imaginarium

English

Etymology

imagine +‎ -arium

Noun

imaginarium (plural imaginariums or imaginaria)

1. A place devoted to stimulating and cultivating the imagination.
   • 1978, The Stanford Engineer, volume 8, page 6:

     To stay as experiential as possible, keeping lectures about imagination to a minimum. This objective is realized when the primary educational content of an Imaginarium program is the participant's own imaginative experience, the participant's visual field. Auditory, tactual, and olfactory imagery are also "modeled."

   • 1985, The Economist, volume 294, page 34:

     They include "Imaginariums" in shopping malls, where youngsters try out their newly learned skills before the public. Other parts of the programs include performances by professional actors and arts workshops for teachers.

   • 2005, William Reed Martin, Arvinder K. Johri, Teaching Beyond the Standards, page 55:

     An inner city middle school class under teacher supervision constructed an Imaginarium to create interest in astronomy within science studies. Made from black plastic sheeting held together with duct tape to form a giant plastic bag inflated through a sleeve by a large window fan, students entered the Imaginarium to add their imaginative or real (e.g., the Big Dipper) design for creating a starry, and often pretty accurate, "night sky."

   • 2023 March 3, Ross Douthat, “What a Visit to Disney World Reveals About America”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     First, to get the explicit culture-war stuff out of the way: To go deep into the temples of the Disney imaginarium is to feel the irrelevance of any merely political assault upon its cultural position.

Usage notes

• Most often used in the names of museums and science centres.

Latin

Adjective

imāginārium

1. inflection of imāginārius:
   1. nominative/accusative/vocative neuter singular
   2. accusative masculine singular