What's the difference between figment and invention?

Figment


Definition:

  • (n.) An invention; a fiction; something feigned or imagined.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) You can imagine how frustrating this is for teenagers like myself who make a point of being politically engaged, only to find that our interest is seen as a figment of someone’s imagination.
  • (2) With no Hull player, let alone the official body that monitors the suspension bridge, remotely aware of such an incident, The Observer put it to Brown that the apparently suicidal female was a figment of his imagination.
  • (3) Any shift the public may detect in immigration proposals advanced by Donald Trump is a figment of the imagination, top Trump surrogates said in a coordinated maneuver on Sunday.
  • (4) He wanted so much to convince his mates that he really had spied a miracle and to make sure that his normally placid mind had not fallen victim of some strange figment of the imagination, a confidence trick, a sudden mirage brought on by the unrelenting rays of the sun.'
  • (5) Earlier, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, John Redwood, the former cabinet minister, described claims by Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler that up to eight Tories were about to defect as "a figment of Ukip's imagination", as party chiefs sought to calm the party's nerves.
  • (6) Show us another player who has radiated as much influence as Eric Cantona and we will show you a figment of your imagination.
  • (7) Many tabloid newspapers have joined in, giving the impression that rape is simply a figment of mad women's imaginations.
  • (8) It makes this image even more of a figment of my imagination.
  • (9) The lengthy scenes of flatly described sex, commonly with two women at once, read like pornographic figments.
  • (10) Redwood dismissed the possibility of eight defectors when he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4: "The so-called eight are a figment of Ukip's imagination.
  • (11) Yes, although in this case, I’ve made clever use of ambiguity, because “selfie teeth” are often a figment of your imagination.
  • (12) But he described the idea of welfare tourism as a "figment of some politician's imagination" because Poles in Britain worked and sent back earnings that have been taxed.
  • (13) March of the makers remains a figment of Osborne's imagination Read more “A lot of this is driven by the ongoing weakness of global commodity prices.
  • (14) A claim by Ukip that eight more MPs are thinking of defecting to the party has been dismissed as a figment of the party's imagination by John Redwood, a former Tory cabinet minister and leading Eurosceptic.
  • (15) Figments of imagination and previous experiences enter into each clinic room emotional situation, and the apprehensions of the child, the parent and the doctor must be anticipated and acknowledged.
  • (16) Such an investigation would indeed be odious, but it's a figment of Boal's imagination.
  • (17) It can no longer be rubbished as some spurious subjective figment of the victim’s “paranoid” imagination, which sadly is an attitude that extends far beyond actual abusers.
  • (18) We aim this useful figment at an (equally hypothetical) photosynthetic system all of whose units are set up to perform the same primary reaction.
  • (19) She is an outsider, a "difficult" woman whose old comrades from the communist party still smart from her brisk re-evaluation of the movement as a figment of their own "mass psychopathology".
  • (20) As for the march of the makers, that remains a figment of the chancellor’s imagination.

Invention


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of finding out or inventing; contrivance or construction of that which has not before existed; as, the invention of logarithms; the invention of the art of printing.
  • (n.) That which is invented; an original contrivance or construction; a device; as, this fable was the invention of Esop; that falsehood was her own invention.
  • (n.) Thought; idea.
  • (n.) A fabrication to deceive; a fiction; a forgery; a falsehood.
  • (n.) The faculty of inventing; imaginative faculty; skill or ingenuity in contriving anything new; as, a man of invention.
  • (n.) The exercise of the imagination in selecting and treating a theme, or more commonly in contriving the arrangement of a piece, or the method of presenting its parts.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) One of the things Yang has said he wants to investigate is: "This state we're in ... a moment when we have to negotiate our past while inventing our present."
  • (2) When we arrived, he would instruct us to spend the morning composing a song or a poem, or inventing a joke or a charade.
  • (3) Clearly, therefore, image is everything, especially in a world that can still be unkind to geeky people venturing out in public wearing their latest invention.
  • (4) Since its invention a few years ago, the atomic force microscope has become one of the most widely used near-field microscopes.
  • (5) No, Did they invent sliding fingers across substances?
  • (6) They just lacked the invention to find a way through.
  • (7) Three times a week, he rolled his wheelchair up to a computer monitor and allowed scientists from Battelle , a nonprofit research organisation that invented the technology they hoped would let him move his hand with his thoughts again, to plug into his brain.
  • (8) The cecal foramen pointer was invented for a Sistrunk median cervical cyst operation.
  • (9) Inside, the tiles and the stained glass are said to be perfection, matched against murals that depict the inventions of the industrial revolution and the signing of the Magna Carta.
  • (10) There is effective use of a scuba-like neoprene fabric which is slickly practical and gives a bold, shell-like silhouette to hooded coats and to sweatshirts which seems to reference the balloon and cocoon shapes that Cristobal Balenciaga invented to great acclaim in the 1950s.
  • (11) The words you attribute to Mr Mitchell are an invention and they were invented for the same reason – because you could not conceivably have justified giving a Public Order Act warning on what Mr Mitchell actually said.” Rowland said: “No, the evidence I have given is the truth.
  • (12) Concentrate on the way he constructs the space of an interior or orchestrates a sensual camera movement that he invented himself - the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction - and you perceive how each Dreyer film almost brutally reconstructs the universe rather than accepting it as a familiar given.
  • (13) Apple has used the month of January to launch revolutionary products before, in part as a way of diverting attention from its rivals presenting their latest inventions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which Apple does not attend, and that takes place the same month.
  • (14) Southampton remained the more inventive in the second half.
  • (15) Holden Caulfield puts it in a slightly different way: "I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented.
  • (16) "I used to hate lions," he adds, "but now, because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict."
  • (17) After that is accomplished I will change all history books to say that I have invented the frisbee and that this is the most important invention ever.
  • (18) With the invention of the laser, many clinical disciplines have taken advantage of this new energy source.
  • (19) At last, as we have found, also in Ethiopia, stone-tools more than three million years old in association with Australopithecus, it seems that the very first made tools were the invention of prehumans who did not have yet the hands completely free from locomotion.
  • (20) It captures the fact that the eclectic and inventive Adams - who cut his compositional teeth as a member of the minimalist school in the 1970s and 1980s, and then moved on into less strict forms of tonal music - is almost certainly America's most widely performed contemporary composer.