Word.ws English Dictionary

wish fulfilment

wish fulfilment noun: the imagined satisfying of a wish or desire, especially one which was unconscious or not recognised by the holder; the expression of such fulfilment in a dream, fantasy etc.

Noun

wish fulfilment (countable and uncountable, plural wish fulfilments)

  1. The imagined satisfying of a wish or desire, especially one which was unconscious or not recognised by the holder; the expression of such fulfilment in a dream, fantasy etc.
    • The dream represents a certain state of affairs as being as I would wish it to be: its content is thus a wish-fulfilment, its motive a wish.1999, Sigmund Freud, translated by Joyce Crick, The Interpretation of Dreams, Oxford, published 2008, page 95

Forms of wish fulfilment

pluralwish fulfilments

Origin of wish fulfilment

From wish + fulfilment, a calque of German Wunscherfüllung.

Questions about wish fulfilment

What does wish fulfilment mean?
Wish fulfilment means the imagined satisfying of a wish or desire, especially one which was unconscious or not recognised by the holder; the expression of such fulfilment in a dream, fantasy etc.
What part of speech is wish fulfilment?
Wish fulfilment is a noun.
What is the plural of wish fulfilment?
The plural of wish fulfilment is wish fulfilments.

Words near wish fulfilment in the dictionary

  1. wisest-hearted
  2. wisewoman
  3. wisewomen
  4. wish
  5. wish away
  6. wish fulfilment
  7. wish fulfilments
  8. wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first
  9. wish list
  10. wish lists
  11. wish on a star

Source and license

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