phantasmagoric

variants or phantasmagorical

Example Sentences

Recent Examples of Synonyms for phantasmagoric
Adjective
  • But the sound and lighting effects get rather heavy-handed during Josh’s hallucinatory meltdowns.
    Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 28 June 2025
  • The sequence looks positively hallucinatory, illuminated by night stars and aurora borealis streaks in the sky above.
    Peter Debruge, Variety, 18 June 2025
Adjective
  • The movie presents the years of Agnes’s life out of order, a choice that invites us into her experience of surreal circling rather than forward movement.
    Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 29 June 2025
  • Shot in a single location with handcrafted paper sets, the film follows three siblings through a surreal, fairytale space.
    Ben Croll, Variety, 27 June 2025
Adjective
  • Despite the book’s suggestive title, the landscape is anything but illusory for Abbott, who grew up in Grosse Pointe and spent the first 18 years of her life there.
    Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times, 19 June 2025
  • Wells’s attempt to hold the two in balance relied on a division between art and politics, but that division is entirely illusory.
    Kamila Shamsie June 20, Literary Hub, 20 June 2025
Adjective
  • Since its inception, astronomers had busied themselves tracking the apparent movements of the stars, moon and planets relative to an imaginary line running north to south through the observatory, known as a 'meridian'.
    Anthony Wood, Space.com, 22 June 2025
  • Some will retreat from public life, spurning those closest to them in favor of an imaginary narrative woven with these programs.
    Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 22 June 2025
Adjective
  • Again, these are fictional groups from a Netflix movie (albeit, of course, with real singers behind them).
    Paul Tassi, Forbes.com, 5 July 2025
  • In April 2025, Pascale Hutton, who plays Rosemary Coulter, shared a post on Instagram posing with her on-screen husband, Kavan Smith, who portrays Leland Coulter, and their fictional daughter, Marigold.
    Francesca Gariano, People.com, 5 July 2025
Adjective
  • Although it was portrayed as the fictitious Amity island in the film, many of the location sites are still favorite destinations with travelers — less so for the traffic and tourist-averse year-round islanders.
    Rosemary Feitelberg, Footwear News, 27 June 2025
  • Instead, the two lawyers achieved notoriety in 2023 when the judge in the case fined the pair $5,000 for citing six fictitious cases, invented by artificial intelligence software, in a brief to the court.
    Jeff John Roberts, Fortune, 26 June 2025
Adjective
  • Projections of economic gains from major sporting events are typically optimistic, euphoric, chimerical or conjectural.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 19 June 2025
  • In spite of everything, the setting continues to compel me, as does the puzzle of Flores’s fiction, which frames the South Texas border region as a territory both physical and chimerical.
    David L. Ulin, The Atlantic, 21 Feb. 2025
Adjective
  • This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy.
    Hillary Kelly, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2024
  • To separate art from its historical framework is futile, and to reject it in an effort to censor past violence is a delusive act of virtue signaling.
    WSJ, WSJ, 5 July 2022
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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Cite this Entry

“Phantasmagoric.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/phantasmagoric. Accessed 11 Jul. 2025.

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