Word.ws English Dictionary

jamais vu

/ˌʒɑː.meɪ ˈvuː/

jamais vu noun: a sense of unfamiliarity with, or of never having experienced or seen before, something that should be familiar.

Noun

jamais vu (uncountable)

  1. A sense of unfamiliarity with, or of never having experienced or seen before, something that should be familiar.
    • The subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it. He knew, for example, that it was called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu...1961, Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Origin of jamais vu

Borrowed from French jamais (“never”) + vu (“seen”).

Questions about jamais vu

What does jamais vu mean?
Jamais vu means a sense of unfamiliarity with, or of never having experienced or seen before, something that should be familiar.
What part of speech is jamais vu?
Jamais vu is a noun.
How do you pronounce jamais vu?
Jamais vu is pronounced /ˌʒɑː.meɪ ˈvuː/.

Words near jamais vu in the dictionary

  1. Jamaicanizing
  2. Jamaicanness
  3. Jamaicans
  4. jamaicin
  5. jamaicine
  6. jamais vu
  7. Jamal
  8. Jamalpur
  9. Jamalpur District
  10. Jamamadi
  11. jaman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jamais vu (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: “jamais vu.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jamais_vu. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.