Meaning
Wildly fanciful or impossible - a scheme, hope, or plan assembled from parts that cannot belong together. The word carries its monster in plain view: like the Chimera itself, a chimerical project has a lion's head here, a goat's body there, and no chance of standing up. Dismissive and literary; the genetics sense (an organism with mixed cell lines) is technical and unrelated to the fancy - context separates them cleanly. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Homer's Iliad describes the Chimera as a creature of divine make, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing fire; Hesiod and Apollodorus agree on the three-part monster, daughter of Typhon and Echidna, and Bellerophon killed her from the air on Pegasus, shot down from the height, in Lycia - where Pliny, citing Ctesias, connected the legend to the real eternal gas vents of Mount Chimaera. The Greek khimaira meant simply she-goat, and English formed the adjective in or around 1638. Medieval tradition had already made hybrid monsters emblems of fraud - Dante's Geryon carries the badge - and the modern sense is that inheritance: Landon's 1837 heroine has some chimerical notion of honour in her head, Tolstoy's prince judges the abbe's plan chimerical in 1869, and Conan Doyle's Holmes complains in 1887 that theories which appear chimerical are really extremely practical. Genetics has since reclaimed the word literally, for organisms of mixed cells.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a chimera
- chimerical hopes
- chimerical scheme
Usage Examples
- The auditor called the syndicate's rescue plan chimerical: four currencies, one collateral, no bank.
- Chimerical hopes of a fourth waterfall kept the expedition fed through two brutal winters.
- The merger memo read chimerical by page three, where the savings began arriving in year nine.