unrealadj.n.

1605 S. Daniel Certaine Small Poems sig. H6^v O be not deceiu'd With that vnreall name [sc. honour]:..honour is a thing conceiu'd, And rests on others fame.

1645 J. Milton Tetrachordon 60 Only for the fals keeping of a most unreal nullity, a mariage that hath no affinity with Gods intention.

1746 P. Francis tr. Horace in P. Francis & W. Dunkin tr. Horace Epistles ii. i. 289 He gives a desperate Trial of his Art,..Who with unreal Terrours fills my Breast.

1810 R. Southey Curse of Kehama iv. 30 Musing so long he lay, that all things seem Unreal to his sense, even like a dream.

1918 T. Q. Dumont Power of Concentration vii. 63 The Mental Demand seems an unreal power because it is intangible; but it is the mightiest power in the world. It is a power that is free for you to use.

2008 A. Miah & E. Rich Medicalization of Cyberspace ii. 30 The tendency for some academics to diminish the Internet as mere ‘unreal’ space.

1837 Trans. 6th Ann. Meeting Western Literary Inst. xvi. 220 The very way in which the stage is sustained by masks, false dresses and scenery..shows that..fictions of unreal scenes in life, are the grand objects of its votaries.

1871 J. R. Lowell My Study Windows 153 Those who have most loudly advertised their passion for seclusion..have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men.

1903 Critic (N.Y.) Oct. 379/1 The first of these novels is a somewhat unreal and exaggerated love-romance of the Civil War.

1913 A. Bennett Old Adam x. 333 Unreal! Fantastic! Was this he, Edward Henry? Could it be still his mother's son?

1960 N. Coward Diary 27 Jan. (2000) 428 The descriptions of the river and London and the general atmosphere of the period are all superb, but why, oh why, those treacly, tear-sodden, pious, noble, completely unreal scenes which I cannot believe that he believed himself.

2003 Bitch Summer 70/1 Highsmith eventually becomes aware of..the unreal expectations she placed on their affair.

1838 G. F. Graham Ess. Theory & Pract. Musical Composition 17/2 What are called passing notes, or unreal notes, and which are said not to form any real part of the melody or the harmony.

1882 Amer. Jrnl. Philol. 3 434 The four leading forms of the conditional will be designated as ‘logical’, ‘anticipatory’, ‘ideal’, and ‘unreal’... ‘Unreal’ in the form irrealis for the condition ‘contrary to fact’ has become very popular among the Germans of late.

1918 Classical Jrnl. 13 354 Both the Latin and the English use the pluperfect tense to express the past unreal condition, an imperfect tense for the present, and a present tense for the less vivid future (ideal).

2007 Classical Q. 57 633 Josephus employs past unreal conditional sentences for dramatic purposes in the characterization of Titus.

1965 Harper's Bazaar Apr. 173 Unreal. Like great. She's real unreal.

1966 Current Slang (Univ. S. Dakota) 1 ii. 6 Unreal,..difficult... English 440 is unreal!

1986 Truckin' Life June 114/1 I reckon your magazine is unreal. I've never missed an issue for the last four years.

2013 N.Z. Herald (Nexis) 19 Mar. The way they're treating me in there, it's unreal... They won't let me be. They put me back in prison for nothing.

2013 S. Wales Echo (Nexis) 9 Nov. 50 We all relish life at the top level. I am enjoying playing for Cardiff City. Our squad is unreal.

1825 W. Hazlitt Spirit of Age 370 He invents the unreal, he embellishes the false with the glosses of fancy, but pays little attention to ‘the words of truth and soberness’.

1884 tr. H. Lotze Logic 53 What modality have such sentences as these, ‘S will be P’, ‘S ought to be P’, ‘S may be P’, ‘S has been P’? No one of them affirms reality, but the unreal which is past in the last is something quite different from that which is permitted, enjoined, or future in the others.

1932 W. T. Stace Theory of Knowl. 332 Shareability of perception is what distinguishes the real from the unreal.

2002 V. Kestenbaum Grace & Severity of Ideal ix. 207 Imagination draws us through and then away from the unreal and fantastic so as to transform the real.