William Craft Brumfield
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The notion of using the Greek noun oneiros (meaning "dream") to form the English adjective oneiric wasn't dreamed up until the mid-19th century. But back in the late 1500s and early 1600s, linguistic dreamers came up with a few oneiros spin-offs, giving English oneirocriticism, oneirocritical, and oneirocritic (each having to do with dream interpreters or dream interpretation). The surge in oneiros derivatives at that time may have been fueled by the interest then among English-speaking scholars in Oneirocritica, a book about dream interpretation by 2nd-century Greek soothsayer Artemidorus Daldianus. In the 17th century, English speakers also melded Greek oneiros with the combining form -mancy ("divination") to create oneiromancy, meaning "divination by means of dreams."
Examples of oneiric in a Sentence
Ana Karina Zatarain, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2024
So far, so literal, but there’s something slightly oneiric about this conjunction of slight odd events that places the action in the register of the uncanny.
—Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 9 Jan. 2024
Highlighting seminal works from the past two decades of her trailblazing career, the exhibition features iconic tapestries mingled with gesso, gold leaf, and palladium, as well as an array of oneiric three-dimensional installations de Amaral masterfully builds from thread.
—Salomé Gómez-Upegui, Vogue, 22 Sep. 2022
The poem operates by a kind of fairy logic: mesmerizing, oneiric, enchanted, with language that surprises and clauses that seem to magnetically adhere.
—Verity Spott Anne Boyer, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2023
The two women are traced in Kara Walker’s familiar, cartoonish line, which seems to combine in a single gesture the comic brevity of Charles Schulz, the polemical pamphleteering of William Hogarth, and the oneiric revelations of Francisco Goya and Otto Dix.
—Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb. 2020
But for Baumbach, part of the appeal of visualizing White Noise’s oneiric, suburban landscape was rooted in his own effusive memories of the decade during which it was written.
—Erik Morse, Vogue, 27 Dec. 2022
Fiction acquires the true, tangible qualities of a hallucination while reality becomes somehow an oneiric dimension.
—Vogue, 12 Sep. 2022
Fiction acquires the true, tangible qualities of a hallucination while reality becomes somehow an oneiric dimension.
—Vogue, 12 Sep. 2022
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oneiric.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near oneiric
Cite this Entry
“Oneiric.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oneiric. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.
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