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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
illusory
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Signs of economic recovery may be illusory.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And like those concepts, its benefits are illusory and potential consequences alarming.
▪ Escape proves illusory, as we must know it will.
▪ For feminists, therefore, the comfort they give is illusory.
▪ His universalism seemed to offer unending real misery punctuated by periods of illusory bliss.
▪ The Ego is the limited, separated, illusory self which can not see beyond the end of its own nose.
▪ This leads me to question the completely illusory quality of such identifications.
▪ Whatever we do, we must avoid the illusory solution of disengaging from the world by abandoning peace operations.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Illusory

Illusory \Il*lu"so*ry\, a. [Cf. F. illusore.] Deceiving, or tending of deceive; fallacious; illusive; as, illusory promises or hopes.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
illusory

1590s, from French illusorie, from Late Latin illusorius "ironical, of a mocking character," from illus-, past participle stem of Latin illudere "mock at," literally "to play with," from assimilated form of in- "at, upon" (see in- (2)) + ludere "to play" (see ludicrous).

Wiktionary
illusory

a. Resulting from an illusion; deceptive, imaginary, unreal

WordNet
illusory

adj. based on or having the nature of an illusion; "illusive hopes of of finding a better job"; "Secret activities offer presidents the alluring but often illusory promise that they can achieve foreign policy goals without the bothersome debate and open decision that are staples of democracy" [syn: illusive]

Usage examples of "illusory".

Logue and Adda had come Waving across to the illusory safety of the habitat.

And that safety was illusory for the racking jars of the spatial see-saw might disintegrate La Cucaracha in seconds.

The sleeper slows, frozen, drops away to shatter against the illusory dirt.

Driver and Lemieux -- their avatars shabby-suited like Bukharin and Zinoviev -- sat behind the table, frowning over data in its illusory depths.

Sarah saw no point in doing something that would obviously be edited out when the people involved backspaced into their normal lives, while Mike felt that any pleasant experience was worth exploring, no matter how illusory it might turn out to be.

In this view, our subjective sense of making choices, intentionally pursuing our desires, and acting on the basis of our beliefs is illusory in the sense that our actions are in reality simply products of our brains in interaction with the environment.

I think my memory has held up better than most, in spite of the unease of illusory deja vu.

They wrapped themselves in greatcoats for a little warmth, but the comfort was illusory for the rain had long soaked into their last stitches of clothing.

Sight had caught the illusory menaces here but somehow been blinded to the real one.

For a consistent scientific thinking that goes this way, therefore, nothing is left but to recognize chaos as the only real basis of an apparently ordered world, a chaos on whose surface the laws that seem to hold sway are only the illusory picturings of the human mind.

That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present existence.

It is possible that lower mammals and reptiles, lacking extensive frontal lobes, also lack this sense, real or illusory, of individuality and free will, which is so characteristically human and which may first have been experienced dimly by Proconsul.

There were thirteen men and women whose representative sims were arranged about die illusory table, seven of whom he did not yet know by name.

There were thirteen men and women whose representative sims were arranged about the illusory table, seven of whom he did not yet know by name.

Larkin entered pointedly and briefly into Miss Lake's offer, which he characterised as 'wholly nugatory, illusory, and chimerical.