Word.ws English Dictionary

Plato's Cave

Plato's Cave proper noun: an allegorical cave whose unwitting, chained inhabitants perceive reality only in the form of shadow puppetry cast by the light of a man-made fire, lacking any awareness of the limitations of their perspective or its constructed nature.

Proper noun

Plato's Cave

  1. An allegorical cave whose unwitting, chained inhabitants perceive reality only in the form of shadow puppetry cast by the light of a man-made fire, lacking any awareness of the limitations of their perspective or its constructed nature.

Origin of Plato's Cave

Described by Plato in the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic.

Questions about Plato's Cave

What does Plato's Cave mean?
Plato's Cave means an allegorical cave whose unwitting, chained inhabitants perceive reality only in the form of shadow puppetry cast by the light of a man-made fire, lacking any awareness of the limitations of their perspective or its constructed nature.
What part of speech is Plato's Cave?
Plato's Cave is a proper noun.

Words near Plato's Cave in the dictionary

  1. platitudise
  2. platly
  3. Platner
  4. platness
  5. Plato
  6. Plato's Cave
  7. Plato's problem
  8. platometer
  9. platometers
  10. Platon
  11. Platonesque

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Plato's Cave (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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