"secondary world" meaning in All languages combined

See secondary world on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: secondary worlds [plural]
Etymology: Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1947 essay "On Fairy-Stories". Head templates: {{en-noun}} secondary world (plural secondary worlds)
  1. (fantasy) An internally consistent, fictional, fantasy world or setting that is different from the real "primary world". Wikipedia link: J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories Categories (topical): Fantasy, Fictional universes, J. R. R. Tolkien, Worldbuilding Synonyms: fantasy world, imaginary world Related terms: high fantasy
    Sense id: en-secondary_world-en-noun-l7NoXs0t Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Topics: fantasy

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for secondary world meaning in All languages combined (4.2kB)

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  "etymology_text": "Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1947 essay \"On Fairy-Stories\".",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "secondary worlds",
      "tags": [
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  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
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          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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          "orig": "en:Fantasy",
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          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Fictional universes",
          "orig": "en:Fictional universes",
          "parents": [
            "Fictional locations",
            "Fiction",
            "Artistic works",
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        {
          "kind": "topical",
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          "name": "J. R. R. Tolkien",
          "orig": "en:J. R. R. Tolkien",
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        },
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        {
          "ref": "1947, J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, page 60",
          "text": "What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1982, Frederick M. Burelbach, “An Introduction to Naming in the Literature of Fantasy”, in Literary Onomastics Studies, volume 9, number 11, page 133",
          "text": "From beginning to end of the fiction we are in the secondary world.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2004, Holly Virginia Blackford, “It's Like a Fantasy World”, in Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls, Teachers College Press, page 48",
          "text": "The girls stress the internal logic of the Secondary World as the crucial point for fantasy pleasure. Mastering the elaborate structure of the Secondary World is part and parcel of the reader's quest to experience a text such as Harry Potter, although the central hero would identify the text as masculine.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2012, Jane Suzanne Carroll, “The Sanctuary Topos”, in Landscape in Children's Literature, Routledge, page 26",
          "text": "The world to which the protagonist belongs is the 'primary' or 'domestic' world. The secondary world is often a binary opposite of the primary world; an inverse, or mirror-image of the consensual reality of the text.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "An internally consistent, fictional, fantasy world or setting that is different from the real \"primary world\"."
      ],
      "id": "en-secondary_world-en-noun-l7NoXs0t",
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      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(fantasy) An internally consistent, fictional, fantasy world or setting that is different from the real \"primary world\"."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "high fantasy"
        }
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "fantasy world"
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        {
          "word": "imaginary world"
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  "word": "secondary world"
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  "etymology_text": "Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1947 essay \"On Fairy-Stories\".",
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          "ref": "1947, J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, page 60",
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  ],
  "word": "secondary world"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (93a6c53 and 21a9316). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.