hallucination
noun
Simple meaning
Illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
huhloosuhnayshuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
həlusəˈneɪʃən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder
A sensory perception of something that does not exist, often arising from disorder of the nervous system, as in delirium tremens.
artificial intelligence
A confident but incorrect response given by an artificial intelligence; a confabulation.
The act of hallucinating; a wandering of the mind; an error, mistake or blunder.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C2 · Proficient (estimated)
- Frequency
- Rare
- Formality
- Technical
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder
Used this way, hallucination is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Medicine/healthcare
- Science
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use hallucination
- “He refused to believe that the angel was a hallucination.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Illusory auditory perception of strange nonverbal sounds.
Illusory visual perception.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
A psychoactive drug that induces hallucinations or altered sensory experiences.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.