Imagination

How to spell imagination

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce imagination

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does imagination mean?

1. nounThe faculty of forming mental images or new ideas of things not present to the senses.

Imagination in a sentence

• The children's game was driven entirely by their imagination.

• Writing a good novel takes both discipline and imagination.

Where does imagination come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word travels back to the Latin verb imaginari, meaning 'to picture something to oneself' or 'to form a mental image', which itself was built on imago, the Latin word for an image, likeness or representation. The Romans used imaginatio for the act of conjuring such pictures in the mind. English took the word in during the 1300s by way of Old French imagination, where it already carried the sense of fancy or invention. Over time the meaning broadened from simply forming pictures to the whole creative faculty of inventing what is not present. The same imago root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'image' and 'imagine', and noticing that the middle of the word is spelled exactly like 'imagine' plus '-ation' is the easiest way to keep the unstressed 'a' in the middle from going astray.

How the word is built

• imagin- (from imaginari: to picture to oneself)
• -ation (noun of action/result)