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hallucination

UK/həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃən/US/həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃən/
nounB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,308 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: hallucinations

A hallucination is seeing or hearing something that is not there. Visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, suffer hallucinations.

Hearing voices is far commoner than seeing things, and both occur in fever, exhaustion and bereavement as well as in illness. The word has lately been borrowed for what a language model does when it invents a fact.

August Natterer · Public domain

Definitions of hallucination

  1. 1nounhallucinationSeeing or hearing something that is not there.B2+

    “After three days without sleep, he began to have hallucinations of people in the room.”

hallucination is a perception.

Where it comes from

Latin hallucinari means to wander in mind, and the noun entered English through Sir Thomas Browne.

  1. Latin

    hallucinatus

  2. English, today

    hallucination

From hallucinate + -ion, from Latin hallucinatus. Compare French hallucination. The first known usage in the English language is from Sir Thomas Browne.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

hallucination in the wild

  • Mental phenomena that may occur during this "threshold consciousness" include hallucinations, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis.

    Hypnagogia

  • Similar hallucinations that occur due to loss of vision are called "visual release hallucinations".

    Closed-eye hallucination

  • Olfactory hallucinations can be caused by common medical conditions such as nasal infections, nasal polyps, or dental problems.

    Phantosmia

  • While experiencing an auditory hallucination, the affected person hears a sound or sounds that did not come from the natural environment.

    Auditory hallucination

  • A common form of auditory hallucination involves hearing one or more voices without a speaker present, known as an auditory verbal hallucination.

    Auditory hallucination

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the hallucinatus family

hallucinatinghallucination

hallucination — used about once every 1,874 pages · #6,308 · point at the bar for the others