Word.ws English Dictionary

notional

/ˈnəʊʃənəl/US/ˈnoʊʃənəl/

notional adjective: of, containing, or being a notion; mental or imaginary.

Adjective

notional (comparative more notional, superlative most notional)

  1. Of, containing, or being a notion; mental or imaginary.
    • Near-synonyms: conceptual, fancied, fanciful, ideal
    • The idea that a rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo rather than ooh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh is socially conventional even though its sound correspondence is at heart notional.
  2. Speculative, theoretical, not the result of research.
    • This paper proposes a notional Federated Identity Management (FIM) architecture.
  3. (Maine) Stubborn.
  4. Having descriptive value as opposed to a syntactic category.
  5. Used to indicate an estimate or a reference amount
    • Gold traded at $909.00 an ounce, up 0.2 percent from New York's notional close of $906.65 on Wednesday.2009 March 11, “Gold inches up on bargain hunt, ETF hits record”, in Ninemsn
    • Under the agreements, Harvard paid the banks fixed interest rates on a total notional amount of $3.52 billion in exchange for floating-rate payments from them.2009 March 3, “Harvard Accepts Higher Debt Costs as Bankers Profit”, in Bloomberg
  6. (informal) Full of ideas or imaginings.
    • She knew what Pete would say if she told him about it — he would say she was getting notional; and she did not want Pete to think of her as a notional woman. Notional women sometimes had a hard time marrying unless they had money.1995, Walter D. Edmonds, In the Hands of the Senecas, page 137

Noun

notional (plural notionals)

  1. A fake company used as a front in espionage.
    • Numerous CIA notionals, created to counter Communist organizations in Western Europe during the Cold War years, remain active and unrevealed.2012, Joseph C. Goulden, Peter Earnest, The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak Into English, page 157

notional meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Kannada

notional in Tamil

கருத்தியலான, புனைவியலான

notional in Urdu

خیالی, نظری, تجریدی, تخمینی

notional in Malayalam

theoretical, hypothe-ticcal, speculative
മനഃകല്പിതമായ, സങ്കല്പം മാത്രമായ, ധാരണാപരമായ, താത്ത്വിക, പരികല്പനയായ, സാങ്കല്പികസിദ്ധാന്തമായ

notional in Kannada

ಕಾಲ್ಪನಿಕ, ಕೇವಲ ಕಲ್ಪನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಕೇವಲ ಸೈದ್ಧಾಂತಿಕ, ಕೇವಲ ಚಿಂತನೆಯ

Synonyms of notional

All synonyms of notional

Forms of notional

Adjective
comparativemore notional
superlativemost notional
Noun
pluralnotionals

Origin of notional

From notion + -al.

Words formed from notional

Phrases with notional

Words that rhyme with notional

Questions about notional

What does notional mean?
Notional means of, containing, or being a notion; mental or imaginary.
What is notional in Tamil?
Notional in Tamil is கருத்தியலான, புனைவியலான. See Notional meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is notional?
Notional can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce notional?
Notional is pronounced /ˈnəʊʃənəl/ (UK).

Words near notional in the dictionary

  1. noting down
  2. Notinger
  3. notings
  4. notion
  5. notionable
  6. notional
  7. notional amount
  8. notional amounts
  9. notionalist
  10. notionalists
  11. notionalities

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: notional (page history and authors); notional (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); notional (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); notional (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); notional (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-notional.wav.

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