say it: ahy-DEEL
ideal is an adjective and noun meaning "conforming to an ultimate standard of perfection or excellence; embodying an ideal". It carries 5 recorded senses.
conforming to an ultimate standard of perfection or excellence; embodying an ideal
constituting or existing only in the form of an idea or mental image or conception
“a poem or essay may be typical of its period in idea or ideal content”
of or relating to the philosophical doctrine of the reality of ideas
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for ideal come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.