REVERIE noun (rev-uh-ree)

noun

1. a state of dreamy meditation or fanciful musing: lost in reverie.
2. a daydream.
3. a fantastic, visionary, or impractical idea: reveries that will never come to fruition.
4. Music. an instrumental composition of a vague and dreamy character.


Quotes

Sometimes I'd lie quite still with my eyes closed for as much as half an hour, letting myself sink slowly into a state of reverie that was almost a trance.
--*Christopher Isherwood,*The World in the Evening, 1954


As the evening wore away he became more and more absorbed in reverie, from which no sallies of mine could arouse him.
--*Edgar Allan Poe,*"The Gold Bug," The Dollar Newspaper, June 21, 1843



Origin

Reverie has calmed down from its original meaning of wild emotion, wild behavior, anger, fury (the 14th and 15th centuries). The Middle French nouns reverie and resverie derive from Middle French verbs resver, raver, rever “to be insane, behave deliriously” (in modern French rȇver means only “to dream”). The current English meaning of daydreaming dates from the 15th century.