as in imaginary
not real and existing only in the imagination
had spent a restless night during which he was visited by a series of phantasmic figures
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Recent Examples of phantasmic
Standing to the right, the viewer perceives this phantasmic figure underneath their reflection, a disturbing Other, a double.
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James Meyer, Artforum, 1 Jan. 2026
Recent Examples of Synonyms for phantasmic
Adjective
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As players shoot around, Jake cradles a ball before blowing past an imaginary defender to hammer home a dunk.—
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At the opening, Natalie, bored and filled with loathing for her parents, flees her family home by retreating into imaginary worlds of vivid, eroticized violence.—
Adjective
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The repetition of that mythic version has buttressed the belief that the fight for American independence was an event somehow separate from world history.—
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That was a really great mythic take.—
Adjective
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As the voice of Rumi, Ejae performed the lead vocals of all the songs for HUNTR/X, the movie's fictional k-pop girl group that moonlights as demon hunters who protect the world from soul-sucking monsters.—
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In the fictional story of the Shakespeare family, their family tragedy leads Shakespeare to write Hamlet.—
Adjective
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Anyone who’s survived to 2026 knows the upper class’ fictitious fantasies still carry real, wretched consequences for the rest of us, but Season 4 plays out those ongoing scenarios to the nth degree, while condensing them into an appreciable narrative arc.—
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The series, which premiered on Netflix at the end of 2024, tells the story of the Buendía family over multiple generations and is set in the fictitious town of Macondo, Colombia, which the family founded.—
Adjective
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Peter [Merry] likes to use is that, when a caterpillar is becoming a butterfly, new ‘imaginal cells’ emerge.—
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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.—
Adjective
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Taken together, the books on this list show narrators real and imagined grappling with some of life’s greatest challenges, and nevertheless surviving—as timely and valuable a message as readers can ask for.—
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Prompted by Einstein, the noncompliant witnesses in the 1950s reshaped the public discussion, refocusing the conversation on the importance of freedom of expression rather than the fears of imagined communist infiltration.—
Cite this Entry
“Phantasmic.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/phantasmic. Accessed 12 Jan. 2026.
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