How to Use phantasm in a Sentence

phantasm

noun
  • Those are all real things, not the phantasms of a junk-food loving fourth-grader’s fever dreams.
    — Emily Heil, Washington Post, 22 Aug. 2023
  • As for Patty Hearst herself, Toobin treats her as a person, not a tabloid phantasm.
    — Dana Spiotta, New York Times, 10 Aug. 2016
  • Gottlieb’s story offers a fleeting glimpse into a world that is usually no more than a phantasm or a hideous dream.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 14 Sep. 2019
  • His drawing shows an electric-blue phantasm on the wing, more like an angel or a pegasus than any earthly being.
    — J. B. MacKinnon, The Atlantic, 19 Mar. 2020
  • The neutrino is a nearly weightless particle that sails through matter like a phantasm.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 8 May 2026
  • But eventually, the duo turned the phantasm into solid logic.
    — Quanta Magazine, 15 July 2021
  • That the nocturnal ritual fantasy is no fantasy, that every phantasm is a sign.
    — Talia Lavin, The New Republic, 29 Sep. 2020
  • The restless ghost of the company—its supernatural imprint—will dwell in the space until the end of time, which is a major plus for any phantasm fan.
    — Richard Lawson, Vanities, 13 Apr. 2017
  • And sometimes the phantasms of artificial intelligence can prompt, in the prompter, genuine emotion.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 1 Mar. 2023
  • No one had meant more to Miami during the past three years, devoting themselves to painstakingly lifting a program plump with the phantasm of a reign long past.
    — Noah White, Miami Herald, 20 Jan. 2026
  • There, like enormous catcher’s mitts, the detectors lie in wait for extremely rare collisions between one of these lumbering phantasms and an ordinary atom.
    — Rachel Courtland, IEEE Spectrum, 1 May 2014
  • But when the team practices in Alexandria, that bullet hole will serve as a dark reminder of the phantasms which long haunt Eugene Simpson Stadium.
    — Chad Pergram, Fox News, 26 Apr. 2018
  • There’s about a second of silence as if everyone were holding their breath — then, bam, the room explodes in a phantasm of whirling red lights and soaring music and everyone crying out all at once and lifting their hands in the air.
    — Heather Chaplin, Cosmopolitan, 7 Sep. 2017
  • The rest are freaks and phantasms, the lone exception being Callie Hernandez as the millionaire’s daughter, who manages to seem wise and lost and sad before vanishing from the action.
    — Ty Burr, BostonGlobe.com, 3 July 2019
  • As Susan Owens highlights in her new cultural history of ghosts, phantasms and spirits have assumed many guises and taken up numerous causes over the millennia.
    — The Economist, 28 Oct. 2017
  • Southern lawmakers baselessly claimed Black men were lynched for raping White women -- a phantasm that still haunts Black men -- and asserted laws governing lynchings were best left to the states.
    — Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 27 May 2021
  • In times of increasing cynicism and apathy in the zeitgeist, this phantasm extravaganza — at once humorously deadpan in its playful tableaus and poignantly sincere at its emotional core — feels like a breath of fresh air.
    — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 21 Oct. 2025
  • The phantasm of an all-powerful, all-controlling, irredeemably evil Kremlin has diverted too much attention from Americans’ own failings, and their duties to rectify them.
    — Stephen Kotkin, Foreign Affairs, 21 May 2019
  • Entire families of the hairy monsters apparently traveled the base’s buildings and corridors, appearing and disappearing at will, and to the bewilderment of base police sent chasing after the phantasms.
    — Aaron Gilbreath, Longreads, 25 Apr. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'phantasm.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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