pipe-dream

noun

any fantastic notion, hope, or story: Her plans for a movie career are just a pipe dream.

Origin:
1895–1900, Americanism

Dictionary.com Unabridged

verb (used without object), pipe-dreamed or pipe-dreamt, pipe-dream·ing.

to indulge in pipe dreams; fantasize.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
Cite This Source

Link To pipe-dream

Relevant Questions

What Does Pipe Dream?

Where Is Pipe Dreams?

What Is A Pipe Dream?

What Does Pipe Dream?

What Is A Pipe Dream?

Where Is Pipe Dreams?

00:10

Pipe-dream is always a great word to know.

So is flibbertigibbet. Does it mean:

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

Collins

World English Dictionary

pipe dream

—n
	a fanciful or impossible plan or hope

[alluding to dreams produced by smoking an opium pipe]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

Matching Quote

"Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia."

-Walter Pater

Want pipe-dream ad-free? Click here!