Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudo-chromesthesia

pseudo-chromesthesia noun: a type of synesthesia when sounds trigger involuntary, subjective sensations of color; during which a person might see colors when they hear music, specific pitches, words, or everyday noises (e.g. a "blue" sound or a "red" voice); a mental association rather than a true, external visual perception.

Noun

pseudo-chromesthesia (plural pseudo-chromesthesias)

  1. (obsolete, rare) A type of synesthesia when sounds trigger involuntary, subjective sensations of color; during which a person might see colors when they hear music, specific pitches, words, or everyday noises (e.g. a "blue" sound or a "red" voice); a mental association rather than a true, external visual perception.
    • The helpfulness of pseudo-chromesthesia is less obvious, yet it is reported in about one-fourth our cases. ' ' Colors do not look right," one subject writes, " unless a word is spelled right. For instance, I spelled permanent, the other day, with two a’s, and it did not look pale enough." Another...1893, Calkins, Mary Whiton, A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental-Forms, The American Journal of Psychology
    • In The American Journal of Psychology for October, 1892, Dr. William O. Krohn treats of the curious phenomena of pseudo-chromesthesia, in which sound gives rise to colo sensation, and he explains it by the nearness of the auditory and visual centers in the brain cortex.1897, Wake, C. Staniland, “Musical Tone and Color”, in Music A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Art, Science, Technic and Literature of Music · Volume 11

Forms of pseudo-chromesthesia

pluralpseudo-chromesthesias

Origin of pseudo-chromesthesia

From pseudo- + (from the Ancient Greek word pseudēs, meaning "false" or "lying") + chrom (from the Ancient Greek word chrōma, meaning "color" + -esthesia (from the Ancient Greek word aisthēsis, meaning "sensation" or "perception"). In 1848, French physician Dr. Charles-Auguste-Édouard Cornaz became the first person to give a name to the condition of synesthesia, at the time calling it hyperchromatopsia. This term fell out of favor after French physician Dr. Ernest Chabalier coined the term pseudochromesthésie (or pseudochromesthesia, "because of the perception of false colors"). The influence of Chabalier's term continued until the 1900s, when synesthésie eventually evolved into synesthesia.

Words formed from pseudo-chromesthesia

Questions about pseudo-chromesthesia

What does pseudo-chromesthesia mean?
Pseudo-chromesthesia means a type of synesthesia when sounds trigger involuntary, subjective sensations of color; during which a person might see colors when they hear music, specific pitches, words, or everyday noises (e.g. a "blue" sound or a "red" voice); a mental association rather than a true, external visual perception.
What part of speech is pseudo-chromesthesia?
Pseudo-chromesthesia is a noun.
What is the plural of pseudo-chromesthesia?
The plural of pseudo-chromesthesia is pseudo-chromesthesias.

Words near pseudo-chromesthesia in the dictionary

  1. pseudo-borrowing
  2. pseudo-borrowings
  3. pseudo-cereal
  4. pseudo-cereals
  5. pseudo-Chinese
  6. pseudo-chromesthesia
  7. pseudo-city code
  8. pseudo-city codes
  9. pseudo-Clement
  10. pseudo-Clementine
  11. pseudo-colloquial

Source and license

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