phantasm

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Like the generality of people who are psychic and who have never had an experience of the superphysical, my conception of a phantasm was a "thing" in white that made ridiculous groanings and still more ridiculous clankings of chains.

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Definitions (12)

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  1. noun Something apparently seen but having no physical reality; a phantom or an apparition. Also called phantasma.
  2. noun An illusory mental image. Also called phantasma.
  3. noun In Platonic philosophy, objective reality as perceived and distorted by the five senses.

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Examples (50)

  • Except for the "Democratic Republic" and its phantasm-driven "Göbbels service", no one can find the satellite. —  The Brussels Journal - The Voice of Conservatism in Europe
  • My years on campus have been a flitting phantasm-a blurred mirage of blue and buildings used to shade in the gaps between real life away from Duke-real life thanks to Duke. —  The Chronicle
  • The sun burst suddenly through a rift in the flying clouds, and his golden radiance fell incongruously upon the scene Ethel gazed as at some horrid phantasm--the rough men with gaudy shirts of red and blue and multicolored checks, standing in groups with tense, set faces--the other man--_her man--standing alone, silent and smiling, by the side of his blood-bathed victim, and the old crone, whose marcid form writhed in the swing of the thin-shrieked chant And then before she sensed that he had moved he stood before her. —  The Promise A Tale of the Great Northwest
  • This phantasm is everywhere in this book. —  The Hacker Crackdown, law and disorder on the electronic frontier
  • Like the generality of people who are psychic and who have never had an experience of the superphysical, my conception of a phantasm was a "thing" in white that made ridiculous groanings and still more ridiculous clankings of chains. —  Animal Ghosts Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter
 

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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English fantasme, from Old French, from Latin phantasma, from Greek, from phantazein, to make visible, from phantos, visible, from phainein, to show; see bhā-1 in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Also fantasm, from Old French fantasme, French phantasme = Spanish fantasma = Portuguese fantasma, phantasma = Italian fantasma, fantasima, fantasmo. from Latin phantasma, an apparition, specter, Late Latin also appearance, image, from Greek φάντασμα, an appearance, image, apparition, specter, from φαντάζειν, show, from *φαντός, verbal adjective of φαίνειν (√ φαν), show, in pass, appear, from φάειν, shine, = Sanskritbhā, shine. Cf. phase, phenomenon, etc., from the same root. From the same Greek word, through Old French, is derived English phantom.
 

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/ˈfæntæzm/
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