Word of the Day!

phantasmagoria [fan-taz-muh-gawr-ee-uh, -gohr-]

noun:
1 having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination
2 having the appearance of an optical illusion, especially one produced by a magic lantern
3 changing or shifting, as a scene made up of many elements

Examples:

Witness the number 'Sunday,' an homage to Sondheim's faultless musical 'Sunday in the Park with George.' In Miranda's imagining, the song becomes a theater-history phantasmagoria, with an endless parade of Broadway stars appearing as extras. (Scott Hocker, 8 movie musicals that prove the screen can share the stage , The Week, May 2024)

The program has given us the dramatis personae of the political world as miniaturised cartoon figures racing through a phantasmagoria, or as all-too-human personalities trapped in a chair by Cassidy's steadily relentless questioning - or sometimes caught on camera during moments of flailing desperation, in what are badged 'Matt Price moments.' (Jane Goodall, Softly, softly, Inside Story, June 2019)

The result is a eye-popping phantasmagoria, with wild shapes shaded in rainbow filling the background, flowers adorning the bottom of the page, and small, intricate doodles covering Carlile’s body, bringing the whimsical style of Fewocious’ work to the pages of Billboard. (Divya Venkatamaran, Nithiyendran and the 'otherness' of his art, GQ, November 2022)

It is the hour when Byron's brain becomes thronged with a glowing phantasmagoria of ideas that cry aloud for visible expression. (May Clarissa Gillington, A Day with Lord Byron)

A review of the past then rose up before her, from the time of her first entering that house, the bride of Mr Carlyle, to her present sojourn in it. The old scenes passed through her mind like the changing picture in a phantasmagoria. (Mrs Henry Wood, East Lynne)

Origin:

'fantastic series or medley of illusive or terrifying figures or images,' 1802, the name of a magic lantern exhibition brought to London in 1802 by Parisian showman Paul de Philipstal. The name is an alteration of French phantasmagorie, which is said to have been coined 1801 by French dramatist Louis-Sébastien Mercier as though to mean 'crowd of phantoms,' from Greek phantasma 'image, phantom, apparition' (from PIE root bha- 'to shine'). The second element appears to be a French form of Greek agora 'assembly. 'But the inventor of the word prob. only wanted a mouth-filling and startling term, and may have fixed on -agoria without any reference to the Greek lexicon' [OED]. The transferred meaning 'shifting scene of many elements' is attested from 1822. (Online Etymology Dictionary)