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/aɪdˈil/ Listen

adjective

Ideal adj.

Existing in idea or thought; conceptional; intellectual; mental; as, ideal knowledge.

Reaching an imaginary standard of excellence; fit for a model; faultless; as, ideal beauty. "There will always be a wide interval between practical and ideal excellence."

Existing in fancy or imagination only; visionary; unreal. "Planning ideal common wealth."

Teaching the doctrine of idealism; as, the ideal theory or philosophy.

(Math.) Imaginary.

Synonyms: Intellectual; mental; visionary; fanciful; imaginary; unreal; impracticable; utopian.

noun

Ideal n. A mental conception regarded as a standard of perfection; a model of excellence, beauty, etc. "The ideal is to be attained by selecting and assembling in one whole the beauties and perfections which are usually seen in different individuals, excluding everything defective or unseemly, so as to form a type or model of the species. Thus, the Apollo Belvedere is the ideal of the beauty and proportion of the human frame."

Beau ideal. See Beau ideal.

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Etymology of 'Ideal'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books

... So anxious are they to be thought civilized. There is nothing that hurts a gentleman's feelings in Japan more than to hear one say, "They have such a beautiful country and when they are converted from heathenism it will be ideal." There is a strong Episcopal church ...

— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... aborigines. Clearly, therefore, the species which naturally inhabits a country is not necessarily the best adapted to its climate and other conditions." Australian aboriginals having given way before a race better fitted to flourish, what will the future of the new race be? What ideal is at ...

— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... to them, to educate them—all the essentials of moral and mental education a child owed its mother. Or went without. Quite a number, I admit, went without. Nowadays, clearly, there is no more need for such care than if they were butterflies. I see that! Only there was an ideal—that figure of a grave, patient woman, silently and serenely mistress of a home, mother and maker of men—to love her ...

— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... one the struggles of the past came up to him; each had seemed a triumph when he was in the glory of strength and hope. The splendid aims of a higher and nobler government, built by sheer truth and nobility of purpose upon the ashes and dust of present corruption, the magnificent purity of the ideal State of which he had loved to dream—all that he had thought of and striven after as most worthy of a true man to follow, dwindled now away into a hollow and mocking image, more false than hollowness itself, poorer and of less substance than ...

— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... naturally to produce. As we found that the kinds of sentences which are theoretically best, are those generally employed by superior minds, and by inferior minds when excitement has raised them; so, we shall find that the ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands. This constant employment ...

— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer

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