insubstantiality

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Lack of substance

Nouns

1. (lacking substance) insubstantiality; nothingness, nihility; nothing, naught, nil, nullity, zero, cipher, no one, nobody; never a one; no such thing, none in the world; nothing whatever, nothing at all, nothing on earth; not a particle (see littleness); all talk, moonshine, stuff and nonsense; shadow; phantom; dream (see imagination); ignis fatuus; [thin] air; bubble; mockery; hollowness, blank, void (see absence); inanity, fool's paradise. Slang, goose egg. See nonexistence, unimportance.

2. (lack of material being) immateriality, immaterialness, intangibility; in-corporeality, disembodiment; spirit, soul, ego; spiritualism, spirituality.

Verbs — immaterialize, dematerialize; disembody, spiritualize (see disappearance).

Adjectives — insubstantial, unsubstantial; bodiless, incorporeal, spiritual, immaterial, intangible, unearthly; psychical, supernatural; visionary, imaginary (see imagination); dreamy; shadowy, ethereal, aerial, airy, spectral; weightless; vacant, vacuous, empty (see absence), blank, hollow; nominal, null; inane.

Quotations — All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream (Edgar Allan Poe), We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep (Shakespeare), Nothingness haunts being (J. P. Sartre).

Antonyms, see substance.

II

(Roget's Thesaurus II) noun The condition of being infirm or physically weak: debility, decrepitude, delicacy, delicateness, feebleness, flimsiness, fragileness, fragility, frailness, frailty, infirmity, puniness, unsoundness, unsubstantially, weakliness, weakness. See STRONG.