Psychedelic

How to spell psychedelic

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce psychedelic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does psychedelic mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to vivid, swirling colours and patterns, or to drugs that produce altered perception and hallucinations.
2. nounA drug that produces altered states of perception or hallucinations.

Psychedelic in a sentence

• adjective

  The gallery devoted one room to psychedelic art from the late 1960s.

• noun

  The clinical trial tested a controlled dose of a psychedelic on patients with depression.

• adjective

  Her bedroom wallpaper featured a psychedelic pattern of orange and purple swirls.

• noun

  The museum exhibit traced how a single psychedelic shaped a decade of music and design.

Where does psychedelic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a twentieth-century coinage, built deliberately from two Greek roots: psychē, meaning 'mind' or 'soul', and dēloun, 'to make visible or reveal', from dēlos meaning 'clear' or 'manifest'. The literal idea was therefore 'mind-revealing', describing substances thought to lay the workings of the mind open to view. The psychiatrist Humphry Osmond proposed the term in 1956 in correspondence with the writer Aldous Huxley, settling on it as a neutral label for hallucinogenic drugs. From the 1960s the meaning broadened well beyond pharmacology to describe the swirling colours, distorted patterns, and vivid art, music, and fashion associated with that era. The spelling trap lives in the hidden Greek shape: the silent opening 'p', the 'sych' that sounds nothing like it looks, and the unstressed 'e' before 'delic', all preserved from the classical roots rather than from how the word is spoken.

How the word is built

• psyche- (from Greek psychē: mind, soul)
• dēlo- (from dēlos: clear, manifest)
• -ic (adjective suffix)