Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Playful or fanciful pretense.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Pretense; sham; false or fanciful representation.
- Unreal; sham; pretended.
Wiktionary
- n. The quality or act of pretending; assuming something is true when in fact one knows it is not.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To pretend; -- often used with that, but often having the that omitted.
- n. A feigning to believe, as in the play of children; a mere pretense; a fiction; an invention.
- adj. Feigned; insincere.
- adj. Imaginary.
WordNet 3.0
- v. represent fictitiously, as in a play, or pretend to be or act like
- n. the enactment of a pretense
- n. imaginative intellectual play
- adj. imagined as in a play
Etymologies
- From make + believe. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“With documentaries I guess I feel I want to just enjoy a world of make-believe, of fiction, and not have my emotions tossed all over the place.”
“This ain't Powerpoint make-believe no more - it's building a real, working rocket.”
“Yes, Massenet tells the tale charmingly and makes much of those moments that have fuelled children's make-believe for all time – the ball, the midnight-hour escape and that magical shoe-fitting episode.”
“So I made up some Cubans, put a make-believe protagonist among them and published a novel that caught not the place I'd seen and transcribed so much as the one I'd felt and intuited.”
The Wall Street Journal: The Good Luck of Notes Turned to Ash
“My make-believe was more convincing because Nana had gone upstairs to quilt while dinner baked, and the kiddo was doing homework at the dinette.”
“The discrepancy between the Congressional Budget Office's findings and those make-believe numbers from the White House leaves us with an 8.6% shortfall, but that piece of legislation is not our only worry.”
The Wall Street Journal: Policy Debates Should Use Real Numbers
“Vampires were just make-believe; horror-movie stuff like demons and zombies.”
“And, as always, to Mom and Dad and my family and friends for the unwavering support, and to Audrey, James, and Jonathan for putting up with my “spacey” moments and allowing me time to dwell in make-believe lands.”
“Despite my resources, despite my high profile, when it came to intimate relationships I lived in the world of make-believe.”
“Edgar spares us the spectacle of a make-believe Lamour, it's studded with other vignettes and dubious representations of historical figures: a charm-free Ginger Rogers, a blank-slate Charles Lindbergh, a cloddish Robert F. Kennedy and an appallingly crude approximation of Richard Nixon.”
The Wall Street Journal: 'J. Edgar': Hoover's Life, in a Dramatic Vacuum
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘make-believe’.
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This is not a list
you know that thing where the Eskimos have 50 words for snow?
little white lie, big lie, the Big Lie, economical with t..., muddy the waters, fabrication, deception, lies, damned lies..., façade, slander, omission, web of lies and 159 more...
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Not Quite The Real Thang
masquerade, sham, counterfeit, shyster, phoney, bogus, pseudo, artificial, fabricated, mock, concocted, false and 158 more...
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Idk, I like these words.
ethereality, apathy, consideration, soul, safety, lone wolf, darkness, pressure, ocean, few, collapse, believe and 155 more...
Tweets
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