Word of the Day
: January 15, 2024oneiric
playWhat It Means
Oneiric is an adjective meaning "of or relating to dreams."
// The paintings, filled with fantastical imagery conjured by the artist's imagination, have a compellingly oneiric quality.
oneiric in Context
"The poem operates by a kind of fairy logic: mesmerizing, oneiric, enchanted, with language that surprises and clauses that seem to magnetically adhere." — Verity Spott, The New York Times, 13 Apr. 2023
Did You Know?
The notion of using the Greek noun oneiros (meaning "dream") to form the English adjective oneiric wasn't dreamed up until the mid-19th century. But back in the late 1500s and early 1600s, linguistic dreamers came up with a few oneiros spin-offs, giving English oneirocriticism, oneirocritical, and oneirocritic (each having to do with dream interpreters or dream interpretation). The surge in oneiros derivatives at that time may have been fueled by the interest then among English-speaking scholars in Oneirocritica, a book about dream interpretation by 2nd-century Greek soothsayer Artemidorus Daldianus. In the 17th century, English speakers also melded Greek oneiros with the combining form -mancy ("divination") to create oneiromancy, meaning "divination by means of dreams."
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Name That Synonym
Unscramble the letters to create a synonym of oneiric that can also mean "lying at a great distance": AARYFAW.
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