as in imaginary
not real and existing only in the imagination
phantasmal fears that have prevented her from living a normal life
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Recent Examples of phantasmal
Beyond that, all apparent structures are merely phantasmal.
—
Big Think, 27 Oct. 2025
Big Think, 27 Oct. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for phantasmal
Adjective
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Amounts that would have looked imaginary three years ago are now the entry ticket.—
Renana Ashkenazi,
Forbes.com,
26 May 2026
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But his idealized vision of a past paradise of social cohesion that late-stage capitalism destroyed doesn’t reckon with the snakes that were always there in this imaginary Eden, including a personal betrayal that’s close to home and only comes slithering out in a moment of drunken weakness.—
Leslie Felperin,
HollywoodReporter,
22 May 2026
Adjective
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Those crews worked on the Country Club Plaza, in a home in Lee’s Summit and around local soccer fields — all on the Missouri side, even though the fictional Coach Lasso hails from Kansas.—
Lisa Gutierrez,
Kansas City Star,
29 May 2026
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The show, which follows Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler moving to the fictional South Texas town of Rio Paloma, premiered May 15 and airs Fridays on Paramount+ and the Paramount Network.—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
29 May 2026
Adjective
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Today, the municipality doesn’t seem too eager to promote its affinity for the international language (its tourism office tends to focus more on local castles and caves), but Herzberg has achieved near-mythic status among some Esperantists.—
Katie Thornton,
Harpers Magazine,
26 May 2026
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Horses, those strange mythical creatures.—
Nielsen Dinwoodie,
Forbes.com,
26 May 2026
Adjective
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However, operators often hide behind fictitious or stolen identities and fail to comply with cease-and-desist letters; meanwhile, hosting servers are often untraceable, shielded by anonymization techniques or by being located in countries where legal enforcement is extremely difficult.—
Emma Woollacott,
Forbes.com,
27 May 2026
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He is charged with one count of unlawful voting by aliens and one count of the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under state law.—
Louis Casiano,
FOXNews.com,
19 May 2026
Adjective
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Peter [Merry] likes to use is that, when a caterpillar is becoming a butterfly, new ‘imaginal cells’ emerge.—
Big Think,
Big Think,
7 Aug. 2025
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With one technique, for example—called imaginal exposure—you might be asked to visualize the process of going to the airport, boarding the plane, and experiencing a bad bout of turbulence.—
Angela Haupt,
TIME,
10 May 2024
Adjective
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Community and identity were two central lines of inquiry at this stage, followed by economic implications and the imagined construction of cyberspace, its design, and visual representation.—
Paulo Nuno VicenteAll,
Encyclopedia Britannica,
26 May 2026
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There wasn’t a kind of imagined trick to that.—
Alex Ritman,
Variety,
22 May 2026
Cite this Entry
“Phantasmal.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/phantasmal. Accessed 6 Jun. 2026.
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