Illusion

How to spell illusion

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce illusion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does illusion mean?

1. nounA false or misleading impression of reality, whether of the senses or of the mind.

Illusion in a sentence

• The long mirror in the hallway creates the illusion of a larger room.

• The steady share price gave investors the illusion of a safe market.

Where does illusion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Illusion comes from the Latin illusionem, the noun form of illudere, which literally meant 'to play upon' or 'to mock', built from the prefix in- (here softened to il-) meaning 'into' or 'against' and ludere meaning 'to play'. The early sense carried the flavour of trickery or making sport of someone, since to play upon a person was to deceive them. English took the word through Old French in the 1300s, where it first referred to mockery and false impressions before settling into its modern meaning of a misleading perception of reality. The same ludere root quietly survives in 'ludicrous', 'prelude', and 'delusion', so a thing that fools the eye shares its ancestry with playful nonsense. The spelling trap lives at the front: the doubled L of il- often gets reduced to a single L, and the soft -sion ending is easy to swap for -tion.

How the word is built

• il- (variant of in-: into, upon)
• lus (from ludere: to play)
• -ion (noun suffix: act or state)