hallucination

/həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃən/

hallucination noun: a sensory perception of something that does not exist, often arising from disorder of the nervous system, as in delirium tremens.

Noun

hallucination (countable and uncountable, plural hallucinations)

A sensory perception of something that does not exist, often arising from disorder of the nervous system, as in delirium tremens.
- Hallucinations are always evidence of cerebral derangement and are common phenomena of insanity.1871, William Alexander Hammond, A Treatise on the Diseases of the Nervous System
- The authorities said that the spinach had caused “possible food-related toxic reactions” with those affected experiencing symptoms including delirium, hallucinations, blurred vision, rapid heartbeat and fever.2022 December 18, Yan Zhuang, “How Can Tainted Spinach Cause Hallucinations?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 13 Feb 2023
The act of hallucinating; a wandering of the mind; an error, mistake or blunder.
- This must have been the hallucination of the transcriber.1712 September 8 (Gregorian calendar), [Joseph Addison], “THURSDAY, August 29, 1712”, in The Spectator, number 470; republished in Alexander Chalmers, editor, The Spectator; a New Edition, […]...
(artificial intelligence) A confident but incorrect response given by an artificial intelligence; a confabulation.
- We first identify prominent modes of hallucination by conducting a systematic human study on generated responses which reveals one major source of hallucination as the (mis)-use of wrong entities to describe factual content (Kryscinski et al., 2020), a problem that persists when naively applying...2021 September 14, Nouha Dziri, Andrea Madotto, Osmar Zaiane, Avishek Joey Bose, “Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding”, in arXiv:2104.08455 [cs], →DOI...
- Chatbots even forget that they are a bot and experience "hallucinations", Meta's description for when a bot confidently says something that is not true.2022 August 8, Liam Tung, “Meta warns its new chatbot may forget that it's a bot”, in ZDNET, archived from the original on 26 Mar 2023

hallucination meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

hallucination in Hindi

sensory perception of something that does not exist: विभ्रांति vibhrānti, विभ्रम vibhram, मतिभ्रम matibhram, मतिभ्रांति matibhrānti, भ्रम bhram, भ्रांति bhrānti

hallucination in Tamil

இல்பொருள்தோற்றம், இல்பொருள்காட்சி, உருவெளித்தோற்றம், உருவெளிக்காட்சி, உளமாயம், தோற்றமயக்கம்

hallucination in Marathi

sensory perception of something that does not exist: विभ्रांति vibhrānti, विभ्रम vibhram, मतिभ्रम matibhram, मतिभ्रांति matibhrānti, भ्रम bhram, भ्रांति bhrānti

hallucination in Urdu

فریب نظر, فریب تصور, مغالطہ, تصور کا دھوکا, توہم, واہمہ

More languagesFewer languages

hallucination in Bengali: মতিভ্রম, অলিক দর্শন
hallucination in Telugu: భ్రాంతి bhrānti, భ్రమ bhrama
hallucination in Malayalam: വിഭ്രാന്തി, ഇല്ലാത്ത അനുഭവം ഉളളതായ തോന്നൽ, അബദ്ധം, വ്യാമോഹം
hallucination in Kannada: ಭ್ರಮೆ bhrame
hallucination in Sanskrit: विभ्रान्ति vibhrānti, विभ्रम vibhrama, मतिभ्रम matibhrama, मतिभ्रान्ति matibhrānti
hallucination in Nepali: विभ्रांति vibhrānti, विभ्रम vibhram, मतिभ्रम matibhram, मतिभ्रांति matibhrānti
hallucination in Arabic: هَلْوَسَة halwasa, وَهْم wahm, اِنْخِدَاع inḵidāʕ
hallucination in Indonesian: halusinasi
hallucination in Thai: ภาพลวงตา paa pluang dtaa

Examples of hallucination in a sentence

Hallucinations are about adhering to the truth; when A.I. systems get confused, they have a bad habit of making things up rather than admitting their difficulties.2022 December 16, Farhad Manjoo, “ChatGPT Has a Devastating Sense of Humor”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 13...
A.I. researchers call this generation of untruths “hallucination.”2023 January 10, Cade Metz, “A.I. Is Becoming More Conversational. But Will It Get More Honest?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived...
The hallucinations common to AI also came under fire in the suit for potentially damaging the value of the Times' reputation, and possibly damaging human health as a side effect.2023 December 27, John Timmer, “NY Times sues Open AI, Microsoft over copyright infringement”, in Ars Technica, archived from the original...
“It looks like this is either an A.I. hallucination or a misattributed quote,” Ms. [Meredith] Broussard said.2026 May 19, Benjamin Mullin, quoting Meredith Broussard, “Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.”, in The New...

All 40 example sentences with hallucination

Forms of hallucination

plural	hallucinations

Plural of hallucination: hallucinations

Origin of hallucination

From hallucinate + -ion, from Latin hallucinatus. Compare French hallucination. The first known usage in the English language is from Sir Thomas Browne.

Words formed from hallucination

Words that rhyme with hallucination

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about hallucination

What does hallucination mean?: Hallucination means a sensory perception of something that does not exist, often arising from disorder of the nervous system, as in delirium tremens.
What is hallucination in Hindi?: Hallucination in Hindi is विभ्रांति (vibhrānti), विभ्रम (vibhram), मतिभ्रम (matibhram). See Hallucination meaning in Hindi.
How do you use hallucination in a sentence?: Hallucinations are about adhering to the truth; when A.I. systems get confused, they have a bad habit of making things up rather than admitting their difficulties.
What part of speech is hallucination?: Hallucination is a noun.
How do you pronounce hallucination?: Hallucination is pronounced /həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃən/.
What is the plural of hallucination?: The plural of hallucination is hallucinations.

Words near hallucination in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: hallucination (page history and authors); hallucination (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hallucination (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); Hallucination (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hallucination (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ಭ್ರಮೆ (Kannada) (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-hallucination.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-hallucination.wav.

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