air castle
- noun
- /ɛr ˈkæsl/
- Informal
:
castillo en el aire
- Here I spent my life with Mother, Father, Sisters, and Brothers. Those were my happy days, free from care or worry, helping Mother, rocking Sister's cradle, taking sewing lessons from Mother, sporting with my Brothers, making rafts to float over the mill pond, roaming the wild woods, gathering flowers, and building air castles.
Examples
-
You're arguing against air castles of your own making.
Blog text (33) -
"Roam the wild woods gathering flowers and building air castles..."
Blog text (31) -
She often daydreams about becoming a famous writer, but her friends remind her that those are just air castles.
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His plans to travel the world without a job are nothing more than air castles that he knows he cannot achieve.
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While she loves to think about her future in fashion, she understands that these are merely air castles without a concrete plan.
Synonyms
43
2.6
Pleasant thoughts that distract you from what is happening now
2
8.8
A made-up perfect place that exists only in dreams
1
8.2
An idea or plan that is unrealistic and unlikely to happen
A hope or plan that sounds nice but is unlikely to happen
A silly, impractical thought or suggestion
Antonyms
How Unrealistic
Surface Forms
Morphology
air + castle
The parts give a partial clue: 'castle' evokes something grand or elaborate and 'air' suggests insubstantialness, so a learner can infer a notion of a grand but flimsy idea. However, the evaluative sense 'unrealistic or unattainable dream' relies on a conventional idiom (cf. 'castles in the air') and is metaphorical enough that a B1 learner who simply knows the words may not derive the precise meaning without exposure.
Etymology
Air castle comes from the image of trying to build a castle in the air, something pretty but impossible to make. Because a castle in the air cannot really be built, the phrase means 'an unrealistic hope'.