secondary world
secondary world noun: an internally consistent, fictional, fantasy world or setting that is different from the real "primary world".
Noun
secondary world (plural secondary worlds)
- An internally consistent, fictional, fantasy world or setting that is different from the real "primary world".
- What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief...1947, J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, page 60
- From beginning to end of the fiction we are in the secondary world.1982, Frederick M. Burelbach, “An Introduction to Naming in the Literature of Fantasy”, in Literary Onomastics Studies, volume 9, number 11, archived from the original on 16 May 2021, page 133
- Synonyms:
- fantasy world, imaginary world
Examples of secondary world in a sentence
- He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.1947, J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, page 60:
- The girls stress the internal logic of the Secondary World as the crucial point for fantasy pleasure.2004, Holly Virginia Blackford, “It's Like a Fantasy World”, in Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls, Teachers College Press...
- The secondary world is often a binary opposite of the primary world; an inverse, or mirror-image of the consensual reality of the text.2012, Jane Suzanne Carroll, “The Sanctuary Topos”, in Landscape in Children's Literature, Routledge, →ISBN, page 26:
Synonyms of secondary world
- fantasy world
- imaginary world
Antonyms
Forms of secondary world
| plural | secondary worlds |
|---|
Origin of secondary world
Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1947 essay "On Fairy-Stories".
Questions about secondary world
- What does secondary world mean?
- Secondary world means an internally consistent, fictional, fantasy world or setting that is different from the real "primary world".
- How do you use secondary world in a sentence?
- He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.
- What part of speech is secondary world?
- Secondary world is a noun.
- What is the plural of secondary world?
- The plural of secondary world is secondary worlds.
Words near secondary world in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: secondary world (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “secondary world.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/secondary_world. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.