imagery
the formation of mental images, figures, or likenesses of things, or of such images collectively: the dim imagery of a dream.
pictorial images, as in works of art.
the use of rhetorical images.
figurative description or illustration; rhetorical images collectively.
Psychology. mental images collectively, especially those produced by the action of imagination.
Origin of imagery
1Other words from imagery
- im·a·ge·ri·al [im-uh-jeer-ee-uhl], /ˌɪm əˈdʒɪər i əl/, adjective
- im·a·ge·ri·al·ly, adverb
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024
How to use imagery in a sentence
The poet was in Arcadia, Phillis was a shepherdess, and the conventional imageries of the pastoral valley were the environment.
Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles | Thomas Lodge and Giles FletcherIt was a fitting end to a life of crime and drug-brought imageries.
Whispering Wires | Henry LeverageHe revels indeed in "orgiac imageries," and revelry implies excess.
Selected Poems of Francis Thompson | Francis ThompsonOn this theme she chanted long and lovingly and a hundred coloured, senescent imageries leaped from the song.
Nights in London | Thomas BurkeThere are some scores of ruba'iyat that may be said to have contributed their imageries to the quatrain.
The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam | Omar Khayyam
British Dictionary definitions for imagery
/ (ˈɪmɪdʒrɪ, -dʒərɪ) /
figurative or descriptive language in a literary work
images collectively
psychol
the materials or general processes of the imagination
the characteristic kind of mental images formed by a particular individual: See also image (def. 7), imagination (def. 1)
military the presentation of objects reproduced photographically (by infrared or electronic means) as prints or electronic displays
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Cultural definitions for imagery
The mental pictures created by a piece of writing: “The imagery of “The Waste Land” — crumbling towers, dried-up wells, toppled tombstones — conveys the author's sense of a civilization in decay.”
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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