unreal
/ʌnˈrɪəl
/adjective
1Imaginary or illusory: in the half-light the tiny cottages seemed unreal...
- The intention was to evoke an unreal elsewhere, an imaginary place both freaky and familiar.
- It would be absurd to say that holes in socks are unreal and illusory just because the hole isn't made of anything and is purely an absence.
- From the point of view of taxation, there is nothing unreal or imaginary about that.
Synonyms
imaginary, imagined, fictitious, pretend, make-believe, made-up, dreamed-up, non-existent, mock, false, invented, illusory, mythical, fanciful, fancied, fantastic, fabulous, legendary, chimerical, fairy-tale, phantasmagoric;
hypothetical, theoretical, ideal
informal phoney
1.1 informal, chiefly North American Incredible; amazing.The speeds and turns were unreal, it was amazing....
- The speed and strength of their attacks was phenomenal and bordered on unreal.
- ‘It was unreal, absolutely terrifying,’ she says.
2Unrealistic: many people have unreal expectations of marriage...
- Part of the problem with the parliament is, as commentator Iain McWhirter says, naive idealism and, after a 300-year break, unreal expectations.
- ‘We work because we never had unreal expectations of what the band was supposed to be doing,’ says MacArthur.
- What worries me about the way this modest and thoughtful policy has been rolled out is the unreal expectations invested in it by politicians, and the ideological message in which it is wrapped.
Derivatives
unreally
- In My Darling Clementine, the town of Tombstone is unreally set against the sandstone fingers; the OK Corral is surrounded by cacti and space.
- Not only is the roll printable, it has extremely high acutance - the prints from it appear almost unreally sharp.
- It was dark and dismal by early afternoon, lights projected star-rays on the street, unreally.