Word.ws English Dictionary

presque vu

presque vu noun: a failure to remember something, with the sense that recall is imminent.

Noun

presque vu (uncountable)

  1. A failure to remember something, with the sense that recall is imminent.
    • 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 November 10, Joseph Heller, Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC
    • A psychologist might have termed it presque vu—the sense people sometimes get that something amazing is about to happen—but my name for it was much more humble: a harmony.2011, Stephen King, 11/22/63, New York: Scribner, →ISBN, page 784 of 784–785

Origin of presque vu

Borrowed from French presque (“almost”) + vu (“seen”).

Questions about presque vu

What does presque vu mean?
Presque vu means a failure to remember something, with the sense that recall is imminent.
What part of speech is presque vu?
Presque vu is a noun.

Words near presque vu in the dictionary

  1. presprinkling
  2. prespun
  3. presqualene
  4. Presque Isle
  5. Presque Isle County
  6. presque vu
  7. press
  8. press agencies
  9. press agency
  10. press agent
  11. press agents

Source and license

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