to feel like a ghost
1
8.4
- idiom
:
sentirse como un fantasma
- In the busy city, he often felt like a ghost, invisible among the rushing crowds.
Examples
-
You start to feel like a ghost in your own home.
-
Now Anna feels like a ghost, like someone haunting someone else's life, and so she concentrates on turkey and stuffing and her own children and grandchildren and schoolchildren, and how she needs to construct or reconstruct her own scene.
Fiction book (1991) -
You start to feel like a ghost in your own home.
-
I tell you, I feel like a ghost.
Fiction book (1990) -
I feel like a ghost haunting my own dreams.
Fiction book (1999) -
It makes me feel like a ghost sometimes.
Blog text (27) -
Or the fact that you spend all of your time brooding and ignoring me so that I feel like a ghost in my own house.
-
Standing on the patio beside the stone wall he had built, surrounded by greenery he had planted, outside of the house he designed, he felt like a ghost.
Fiction book (1998) -
Sometimes, when I walk into a crowded room, I feel like a ghost, as if no one can see me.
-
After years in that company, she started to feel like a ghost, overlooked and ignored by her colleagues.
Antonyms
How Invisible
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a simple simile where the meaning is compositionally derived from 'feel' (experience) + 'like' (similar to) + 'ghost' (an unseen spirit); a learner who knows these words can infer feeling unseen or ignored. The metaphor is straightforward and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner is likely to understand the intended sense without prior exposure.
Etymology
The phrase feel like a ghost comes from the picture of a ghost who walks through a room but is not seen or spoken to. So if you feel like a ghost, you 'feel invisible' or 'ignored' by the people around you.