imaginaries

Noun

imaginary (plural imaginaries)

1. Imagination; fancy.
   • By then too Mozart's opera, from Da Ponte's libretto, had made Figaro a stock character in the European imaginary and set the whole Continent whistling Mozartian airs and chuckling at Figaresque humour.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 324
2. (countable) An imaginary number.
3. The set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.
   • The sensory media are sensuous materials which prolong our bodily life into the surrounding world, and hence the media are imaginaries. These perceptually penetrated materials are " imaginaries " because they operate here in our living body […].1978, John Derrickson McCurdy, Visionary Appropriation, page 145

See all 6 meanings of imaginary