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imaginary

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English

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Etymology

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From Middle English ymaginarie, ymagynary, from Latin imāginārius (“relating to images, fancied”), from imāgō, equivalent to imagine +‎ -ary.

The mathematical sense derives from René Descartes's use (of the French imaginaire) in 1637, La Geometrie, to ridicule the notion of regarding non-real roots of polynomials as numbers.[1] Although Descartes' usage was derogatory, the designation stuck even after the concept gained acceptance in the 18th century.

Pronunciation

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Adjective

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imaginary (comparative more imaginary, superlative most imaginary)

  1. Existing only in the imagination.
    imaginary friend
    Unicorns are imaginary.
  2. (mathematics, of a number) Having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of (called imaginary unit).

Synonyms

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Derived terms

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Expressions

Translations

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Noun

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imaginary (plural imaginaries)

  1. Imagination; fancy. [from 16th c.]
    • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 324:
      By then too Mozart's opera, from Da Ponte's libretto, had made Figaro a stock character in the European imaginary and set the whole Continent whistling Mozartian airs and chuckling at Figaresque humour.
  2. (mathematics, countable) An imaginary number. [from 18th c.]
  3. (sociology) The set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole. [from c. 1975]
    • 1978, John Derrickson McCurdy, Visionary Appropriation, page 145:
      The sensory media are sensuous materials which prolong our bodily life into the surrounding world, and hence the media are imaginaries. These perceptually penetrated materials are " imaginaries " because they operate here in our living body […] .
    • 1994, Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining ..., page 51:
      For example, colonial motifs of many kinds became increasingly central to the British national imaginary from the mid-nineteenth century, while the imaginative significance of 'the soldier' has long been derived from, and helped to sustain, the linkage between national and military imaginaries.
    • 2015, Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer, Goethe Yearbook 22, page 96:
      While Oil, its extraction, and the global petroculture and its role in transforming the planet's climate undoubtedly play a crucial role in the Antropocene imaginary — to the extent that petrofiction has been construed not just as a genre but as a periodizing gesture of "petromodernity"  — it would hamper both the imagination and the root of petrofiction to restrict the range of this term to the encounter with fossil fuels within a carbon imaginary.

References

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  1. ^ Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (I)
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