variants
also fantasm
1
as in illusion
a conception or image created by the imagination and having no objective reality
frightened by the phantasms of his own making
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
2
as in apparition
the soul of a dead person thought of especially as appearing to living people
believed that she'd seen the phantasm of her father on the anniversary of his death
Synonyms & Similar Words
Examples Sentences
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Recent Examples of phantasm
The phantasm jeers at me in this lecture theatre.
—
Tega Oghenechovwen, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
There, like enormous catcher’s mitts, the detectors lie in wait for extremely rare collisions between one of these lumbering phantasms and an ordinary atom.
—Rachel Courtland, IEEE Spectrum, 1 May 2014
But eventually, the duo turned the phantasm into solid logic.
—Quanta Magazine, 15 July 2021
Southern lawmakers baselessly claimed Black men were lynched for raping White women -- a phantasm that still haunts Black men -- and asserted laws governing lynchings were best left to the states.
—Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 27 May 2021
See all Example Sentences for phantasm 
Tega Oghenechovwen, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
There, like enormous catcher’s mitts, the detectors lie in wait for extremely rare collisions between one of these lumbering phantasms and an ordinary atom.
—Rachel Courtland, IEEE Spectrum, 1 May 2014
But eventually, the duo turned the phantasm into solid logic.
—Quanta Magazine, 15 July 2021
Southern lawmakers baselessly claimed Black men were lynched for raping White women -- a phantasm that still haunts Black men -- and asserted laws governing lynchings were best left to the states.
—Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 27 May 2021
See all Example Sentences for phantasm
Recent Examples of Synonyms for phantasm
Noun
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Part of the show’s magic is that performers can literally be anybody or anything and the listener completes the illusion with their mind’s eye.Tim Greiving, Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec. 2024
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That illusion is enough to fool even a lie detector.Dmitry Mishunin, Forbes, 10 Dec. 2024
Noun
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To have a follower recount a feat of superhuman strength, or even an apparition, is hard for a layperson to fathom but has the advantage of having happened in the past and out of the view of nonbelievers.Michelle Weber, Longreads, 8 Nov. 2024
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But there can be more to a scary movie than just screaming apparitions or a gradually diminishing number of coeds with a bad sense of self-preservation.Keith Staskiewicz, EW.com, 31 Oct. 2024
Noun
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Or, put a different way, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the six-generation story of the Buendía clan, founders of the town of Macondo, built on cousin-loving, free enterprise, secular kindness and dreams.Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Dec. 2024
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Luis Robert Jr is the dream, but who knows what the Sox are thinking.C. Trent Rosecrans, The Athletic, 10 Dec. 2024
Noun
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The ultimate effect is paradoxical: the more that Valéry eliminates the ghost of pain and passion from the logical machinery of his work, the starker and more affecting the moans and cries of the ghost become.Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2024
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Easier said than done since many of the ghosts that haunt Light Shop are jump-out-of-your-seat scary.Joan MacDonald, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2024
Noun
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But the Eldorado iteration made from 1967 to 1970 was the beginning of GM’s new vision of personal luxury.Robert Ross, Robb Report, 13 Dec. 2024
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Our vision is simply to be the most excellent Professional Publisher there is.Kyle J. Russell, USA TODAY, 13 Dec. 2024
Noun
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The Wizard of Oz Effect In the movie The Wizard of Oz, there’s a scene where the protagonist, Dorothy, and her band of misfits are seeking the great and powerful Oz, an amorphous wizard who appears as a phantom atop an explosion of smoke.Steve Tengler, Forbes, 11 Dec. 2024
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Ghosts has slowly been expanding its world over four seasons to introduce its stalwart spirits to a whole host of new phantoms.Katie Campione, Deadline, 5 Dec. 2024
Noun
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With scary precision, the playwright captures the delusion that roots itself in families who use faith to control.Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Dec. 2024
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Corcoran is under the paranoid delusion that prison guards are torturing him with sound waves.Kristine Phillips, The Indianapolis Star, 6 Dec. 2024
Noun
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Four centuries after Galileo, the United States has become an epicenter of unreality.Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 25 Nov. 2024
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Through its official media, ISIS stoked support around the world for its vivid unreality—the Salafi jihadist utopia—and presented a comprehensive and exactingly consistent picture of what life there was supposedly like.Charlie Winter, Foreign Affairs, 31 Jan. 2017
Thesaurus Entries Near phantasm
Cite this Entry
“Phantasm.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/phantasm. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.
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