imagination
noun
Simple meaning
The image-making power of the mind.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
ihmajuhnayshuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ɪmædʒəˈneɪʃən
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
The image-making power of the mind; the act of mentally creating or reproducing an object not previously perceived; the ability to create such images.
A mental image formed by the action of the imagination as a faculty; something imagined.
Creativity; resourcefulness.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Varies by meaning
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The image-making power of the mind; the act of mentally creating or reproducing an object not previously perceived; the ability to create such images.
Used this way, imagination is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in technical or specialist writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Technical/specialist writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use imagination
- “Popular imagination created a world of demons.”noun
- “He could still hear her in his imagination.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A number of the form a+bi where a and b are real numbers and i is the square root of -1.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A mental image produced by the imagination.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
A place that exists only in imagination.
A creature of the imagination.
A creature of the imagination.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- creativitynoun
- imagineverb
- thinkingnoun
- inspirationnoun
- perceptionnoun
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: image-making power of the mind
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Words can change meaning depending on context.
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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.