Word of the Day

: January 15, 2024

oneiric

adjective oh-NYE-rik

What It Means

Oneiric is an adjective meaning "of or relating to dreams."

// The paintings, filled with fantastical imagery conjured by the artist's imagination, have a compellingly oneiric quality.

See the entry >

oneiric in Context

"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, The New York Times, 13 Apr. 2023

Did You Know?

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."