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Apparition

Supernatural
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A visible manifestation of a ghost or spirit. In poetry, it often signals memory, warning, or unresolved grief.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Gothic Poetry — Gothic poetry turns shadows, ruins, storms and supernatural suggestion into ways of exploring human fear, longing, guilt and uncertainty. More than a collection of frightening images, it is a flexible tradition concerned with what reason cannot comfortably explain.

Detailed Definition
An apparition is a spectral figure that appears to the living, sometimes briefly and without explanation. Poets use apparitions to make absence seem physically present: a dead lover at a window, a soldier crossing a field, or a childhood figure returning in dreamlike light. Its uncertain reality is especially useful in lyric poetry, where the speaker may not know whether the vision is supernatural, imagined, or produced by longing.
Example
Example in poetry:
An apparition appears at the window in a lyric to make grief visible: “My mother stood in rain, a pale apparition among the roses.”; In a war poem, an apparition of a fallen soldier can blur memory and haunting: “At dawn, his apparition crossed the emptied trench.”; Emily Dickinson’s haunted speakers often make invisible presences feel bodily, a useful model for writing an apparition that may be psychological rather than literal.; A poet can delay certainty by asking whether the figure is an apparition or a living visitor, creating suspense and ambiguity.
Additional Notes
An apparition may be literal or psychological: poets use it to make memory visible, especially when grief or guilt seems to return in bodily form. Compare phantom and shade.
Also Known As
Ghost Spirit Phantom ghaist taibhreamh taidhbhse The Wraith Wraith
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