Word.ws English Dictionary

heterocosm

heterocosm noun: a separate or alternative world.

Noun

heterocosm (plural heterocosms)

  1. A separate or alternative world.
    • Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom.1990, Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
    • For Teskey, the exemplary poet of hallucination is Spenser, whose Fairyland is a stable heterocosm, which a reader can enter for sustained periods without undergoing any oscillatory experience.2007, William Poole, “Out of his Furrow”, in London Review of Books, volume 29, number 3, page 16

Forms of heterocosm

pluralheterocosms

Origin of heterocosm

From hetero- + (micro)cosm.

Words formed from heterocosm

Questions about heterocosm

What does heterocosm mean?
Heterocosm means a separate or alternative world.
What part of speech is heterocosm?
Heterocosm is a noun.
What is the plural of heterocosm?
The plural of heterocosm is heterocosms.

Words near heterocosm in the dictionary

  1. heteroconts
  2. heterocoordination
  3. heterocoral
  4. heterocoralloid
  5. heterocorals
  6. heterocosm
  7. heterocosmic
  8. heterocosms
  9. heterocracies
  10. heterocracy
  11. heterocratic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: heterocosm (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.

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