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Delusive vs Imaginary - What's the difference?

delusive | imaginary | Related terms |

As adjectives the difference between delusive and imaginary

is that delusive is producing delusions while imaginary is existing only in the imagination.

As a noun imaginary is

imagination; fancy.

delusive

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Producing delusions.
  • Delusional.
  • Inappropriate to reality; forming part of a delusion.
  • * 1849 , Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
    • It seemed calculated to suggest ideas she had no intention to suggest — ideas delusive and disturbing.
  • * {{quote-Don Quixote, passage=I opened my eyes, I rubbed them, and found I was not asleep but thoroughly awake. Nevertheless, I felt my head and breast to satisfy myself whether it was I myself who was there or some empty delusive phantom; but touch, feeling, the collected thoughts that passed through my mind, all convinced me that I was the same then and there that I am this moment.
    • , volume=2 , chapter=XXIII}}

    imaginary

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • existing only in the imagination
  • * Addison
    • Wilt thou add to all the griefs I suffer / Imaginary ills and fancied tortures?
  • (mathematics) of a number, having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of the square root of -1.

    • Derived terms

    * imaginarily * imaginariness

    Noun

    (imaginaries)
  • Imagination; fancy.
  • * 2002 , , The Great Nation , Penguin 2003, p. 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.
  • (mathematics) An imaginary quantity.

    • External links

    * (Imaginary number)