Word.ws English Dictionary

apophenia

/æpəˈfiːni.ə/

apophenia noun: the perception of or belief in connectedness among unrelated phenomena.

Noun

apophenia (countable and uncountable, plural apophenias)

  1. The perception of or belief in connectedness among unrelated phenomena.
    • Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. And had never, as far as Cayce knows, said another word about it.2004, William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, Penguin UK, →ISBN
    • How to recognize something in sheer noise? A striking visual example of pure and conscious apophenia was recently demonstrated by research labs at Google: […]2016 April, Hito Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition”, in e-flux, number 72

Forms of apophenia

pluralapophenias

Origin of apophenia

From German Apophänie, from Ancient Greek ἀποφαίνω (apophaínō, “to appear”), from ἀπο- (apo-) and φαίνω (phaínō, “appear”), coined by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958.

Words formed from apophenia

Questions about apophenia

What does apophenia mean?
Apophenia means the perception of or belief in connectedness among unrelated phenomena.
What part of speech is apophenia?
Apophenia is a noun.
How do you pronounce apophenia?
Apophenia is pronounced /æpəˈfiːni.ə/.
What is the plural of apophenia?
The plural of apophenia is apophenias.

Words near apophenia in the dictionary

  1. apophasis
  2. apophatic
  3. apophatically
  4. apophatism
  5. apophatisms
  6. apophenia
  7. apophenias
  8. apophenic
  9. Apophian
  10. Apophis
  11. apophlegmatic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: apophenia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “apophenia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/apophenia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.