mythical
/ˈmɪθɪkəl
/adjective
1Occurring in or characteristic of myths or folk tales: one of Denmark’s greatest mythical heroes...
- I had always thought that the Centaur was a mythical beast, but obviously the Greek aristocracy know where to find them.
- They represented deities, mythical creatures, imaginary beasts, and recognizable fauna imbued with symbolic meanings.
- The Gorgon was a mythical creature who portrayed the darkest aspects of the feminine: revenge, hatred, lust for power, bitterness and self hatred.
Synonyms
legendary, mythological, fabled, fabulous, folkloric, fairy-tale, storybook, chimerical;
fantastical, imaginary, imagined, fictitious;
allegorical, symbolic, symbolical, parabolic
1.1Idealized, especially with reference to the past: a mythical age of contentment and social order...
- The anti-capitalism of the protesters on the streets of Seattle represented not the old dream of human liberation, but a fear of the future and a determination to flee back into a mythical past.
- Advocates of this doctrine did not propose a ‘return’ to some mythical American past.
- All going well, it could be the perfect antidote to those who are insisting that we return to some mythical, homogenised past.
1.2Fictitious: a mythical customer whose name appears in brochures promoting the bank’s services...
- The mythical plumber has been named Piotr and is very dangerous.
- Whatever happened to the days when TV shows used mythical place names?
- These stories are inventive and mythical, but never frightening - in fact, it is their slightly humorous quality that lends them much of their charm.
Synonyms
imaginary, fictitious, make-believe, fantasy, fanciful, invented, fabricated, made-up, unreal, untrue, non-existent
informal pretend
Derivatives
mythically
/ adverb ...- The past as Joyce envisaged it can be evoked as a persistent and even powerful residue in what is now present; but it will not be idealized or mythically glamorized.
- Most verse (especially well-made free verse), given the tension between the line and the sentence, has about it a centrifugal force of push and pull that mythically enacts the gravity of an eternal return.
- Definitional whirlpools and methodological monsters have realistically, not mythically, engulfed many reviewers and researchers.