as in illusion
a conception or image created by the imagination and having no objective reality
a sci-fi author who seems to have preferred the unrealities of his own fiction to the realities of the world about him
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Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of unreality
Longtime Vogue readers can likely recognize Steven Klein’s photographs at a glance, what with their glaring colors, arresting compositions, and beguiling sense of unreality.
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Vogue, 7 Oct. 2025
In rare cases, sleepers gain insight into the unreality of their dreams from within the dream itself.
—Rachel Barr, Big Think, 20 Aug. 2025
For Leader, this hammers home the unreality of a studio without an intense marketing machine around it.
—Ryan Gaur, IndieWire, 10 June 2025
What can a mother do, facing reality, facing unreality, but rely on her intuition while at the same time keeping her intuition at bay?
—Yiyun Li, The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for unreality
Recent Examples of Synonyms for unreality
Noun
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Most of them are unemployed and produce nothing but illusions.—
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Then, style the cut with a deep side part to create the illusion of an asymmetrical blunt cut.—
Noun
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Sadly, his college ball dreams didn’t come to fruition after the coach who called him up retired.—
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Over the past seven years, Blake Lively brought her dream hair care line to life by redefining the beauty industry with a blend of passion, precision and purpose.—
Noun
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More elite than university even, the boarding school occupies a fantasy space in the writer’s imagination, making novels about them a tantalizing glimpse into another world.—
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In his director’s statement, Edwin describes the film as an attempt to merge horror with dark comedy and surreal fantasy while confronting labor exploitation and dehumanizing working conditions.—
Noun
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Bob Weir, the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the Grateful Dead, whose songs about sunshine daydreams and truckin’ helped turn the jam band into a 60-year musical empire, has died at age 78.—
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Season 5, after all, is framed by Mike and Eleven’s daydream of a conversation in the first episode.—
Noun
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The vision, however, was as crucial as the sound, and the vision was as yet inchoate, embryonic.—
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In any other news cycle, Disney locking horns with Google would have dominated, but such was the gravity of the Mouse House’s OpenAI agreement, that the battle was somewhat in peripheral vision.—
Noun
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The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke said paralytic dementia symptoms can include delusions along with memory and language problems.—
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But in this version, set in a contemporary world resembling our own, where politics is a spectacle, the main character’s delusions revolve around television.—
Cite this Entry
“Unreality.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/unreality. Accessed 20 Jan. 2026.
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