make-believe

1. 1.

   imagined as in a play

   “the make-believe world of theater”

   “play money”

   “dangling their legs in the water to catch pretend fish”

   Synonymspretend

   Similarunreal

Questions about make-believe

What does make-believe mean?

make-believe means "imaginative intellectual play". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in make-believe?

make-believe has 4 syllables: ma-ke--be-lieve. The stress falls on "ke-".

What is another word for make-believe?

Close synonyms include pretense, pretence, pretend, pretend. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is make-believe a common word?

make-believe is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.