Word.ws English Dictionary

sensawunda

sensawunda noun: wonder or excitement invoked by the grandeur and vision of science fiction.

Noun

sensawunda (uncountable)

  1. (dated, slang) Wonder or excitement invoked by the grandeur and vision of science fiction.
    • How does a non-science fiction writer write science fiction? We had a taste with John Hersey's WHITE LOTUS and MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE and discovered that future visions could be presented with such reality and simplicity that our sensawunda could be thrown away and we could discover, instead...1978, Orson Scott Card, Kalki review, Science Fiction Review, Number 28, November-December 1978, page 33
    • […] in order to be able to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Sultan of Alpha Centauri engineers a breath-taking re-siting of the entire solar system — sensawunda indeed!1989, Foundation, numbers 47-53, page 33

Origin of sensawunda

Deliberate misspelling or eye dialect rendition of sense of wonder.

Questions about sensawunda

What does sensawunda mean?
Sensawunda means wonder or excitement invoked by the grandeur and vision of science fiction.
What part of speech is sensawunda?
Sensawunda is a noun.

Words near sensawunda in the dictionary

  1. sensationlessness
  2. sensations
  3. sensative
  4. sensatorial
  5. sensatory
  6. sensawunda
  7. sense
  8. sense amplifier
  9. sense amplifiers
  10. sense bodies
  11. sense body

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sensawunda (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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