Word.ws English Dictionary

phaneron

phaneron noun: that which is perceived by the mind, regardless of whether it corresponds to reality.

Noun

phaneron (plural phanerons or phanera)

  1. That which is perceived by the mind, regardless of whether it corresponds to reality.
    • This mattered so much to Charles Sanders Pierce that he drew a line between reality — the way the universe truly is — and what he called "the phaneron" — the world as filtered through our senses and bodies, the only information we can get.2013, Vsauce, "Is Anything Real?", 7:39–7:54

Forms of phaneron

pluralphanerons
pluralphanera

Origin of phaneron

Coined by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1905 based on Ancient Greek φανερόν n (phanerón, “that which is visible”), substantivized from the adjective φανερός (phanerós, “visible, apparent, manifest”).

Questions about phaneron

What does phaneron mean?
Phaneron means that which is perceived by the mind, regardless of whether it corresponds to reality.
What part of speech is phaneron?
Phaneron is a noun.
What is the plural of phaneron?
The plural of phaneron is phanerons.

Words near phaneron in the dictionary

  1. phanerogamy
  2. phaneroglossal
  3. phaneromania
  4. phaneromanias
  5. phaneromeric
  6. phaneron
  7. phanerons
  8. phanerophyte
  9. phanerophytes
  10. phaneroporous
  11. phaneropterid

Source and license

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