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say it: reel
real is an adjective, noun and adverb meaning "being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verified existence; not illusory". It is pronounced /ˈɹil/ — reel. It carries 13 recorded senses.
being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verified existence; not illusory
“real objects”
“real people; not ghosts”
“a film based on real life”
“a real illness”
“real humility”
“Life is real! Life is earnest!”
not to be taken lightly
“statistics demonstrate that poverty and unemployment are very real problems”
“to the man sleeping regularly in doorways homelessness is real”
of, relating to, or representing an amount that is corrected for inflation
“real prices”
“real income”
“real wages”
economics
having substance or capable of being treated as fact; not imaginary
“the substantial world”
“a mere dream, neither substantial nor practical”
“The wind was violent and felt substantial enough to lean against”
any rational or irrational number
the basic unit of money in Brazil; equal to 100 centavos
an old small silver Spanish coin
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 real 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.