phenomenal
adjective
Simple meaning
Perceptible by the senses through immediate experience.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
fuhnahmuhnuhlSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
fəˈnɑmənəl
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.
adjective
colloquial
Very remarkable; highly extraordinary; amazing.
sciences
Perceptible by the senses through immediate experience.
philosophy
Of or pertaining to the appearance of the world, as opposed to the ultimate nature of the world as it is in itself.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced (estimated)
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Very remarkable; highly extraordinary; amazing.
Used this way, phenomenal is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in everyday conversation and social media or informal writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Casual
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Playful
- Usage feel
- Casual and conversational
Where it naturally appears
- Everyday conversation
- Social media/informal writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Perceptible
Pertaining
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A philosophical doctrine proposed by Edmund Husserl based on the study of human experience in which considerations of objective reality are not taken into account.
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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.