What is "make-believe"

Usage examples of "make-believe".

When she was a kid, Cutler and her friends had played role-playing games, one right after another, their computers linked into a network of make-believe, eating up hours, days, entire weekends with the flights of adventure and fantasy.

To a people so blessed and so imprinted with the baroque style of living, life itself was something of a dream and the good folk of the city passed the pleasant days and nights of their lives waltzing and wining, in light talk in the congenial coffeehouses, listening to music and viewing the make-believe of theater and opera and operetta, in flirting and making love, abandoning a large part of their lives to pleasure and to dreams.

Thus always, surounded by a world of stern realities, he in a world of make-believe that was even sterner--so is it with children.

Opposite to Cass was a French clock--a piece of make-believe chinoiserie, seeing that the Chinese had no clocks.

Bully and Bawly No-Tail, the frogs, and their papa, reached home from the woods, where they met the make-believe giant, as I told you in the story before this one, they talked about it for ever so long, and agreed that it was quite an adventure.

Or maybe, considering we live in a world where drunks can crush State Troopers against the sides of eighteen-wheelers and where make-believe Buicks show up from time to time at real gas stations, not so amazing.

How many more times could he flog his tank over the grasses and untended crops to fire at make-believe targets, how long until fate stopped flapping her wings over Kursk and descended to them, to sort them all out one by one?

You even liked Nana to say that this was just the mantelpiece over here, and that the Neverland was all make-believe.

Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker every moment, and where was Nana?

Fondling and kissing and whispering and chuckling under the covers, the two young girls sharing secrets and dreams and wants, pretending to be grown-up lovers--as described in the romantic but forbidden street pamphlets that were smuggled in by the chambermaids and circulated from hand to hand amongst the students--all make-believe and healthy and amusing and harmless.

Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe.

Elaine stood in the ball-room surrounded by a laughing jostling throng of pierrots, jockeys, Dresden-china shepherdesses, Roumanian peasant-girls and all the lively make-believe creatures that form the ingredients of a fancy-dress ball.

All around us in gray toppers and frothy dresses the Ascot crowd swirled, a feast to the eye in the sunshine, a ritual in make-believe, a suppression of gritty truth.

Heaven alone knew if these waifs were acquainted with the world of make-believe.

She is where the Frenchmen in their make-believe chateaux, perfum'd, intricately bewigg'd, stop all day at their toilettes, safe from the cold consensus that ignores dream in its Reckonings, France, French agents of Death, at the worst of the fight between the Seahorse and l'Grand, in all that tearful fall from humanity, his Bowels seconds away from letting go, there had wrapp'd 'round him the certainty that whatever was come for him now, had also come for her then, not in the way of a Bailiff or Assassin, at all selective, but rather as a Dredge, a Scavenger, foraging blind, unto which Mason sens'd himself about to be gather'd, as mindlessly as any seaman above-decks, forever to him nameless.