deja vu

4 synonyms for deja vu, grouped by meaning and by how common each one is.

Noun — The strange feeling that you have already lived through the present moment before, even though you know you have not.

Synonyms

Less common

Still standard English, but they carry more weight.

familiarity repetition

Rare, literary or technical

Precise, but they will stand out — check the sense before using one.

the feeling of having been here before rerun

Synonyms by Meaning

1. noun

The strange feeling that you have already lived through the present moment before, even though you know you have not.

“Walking into the empty station, I had a powerful sense of deja vu.”

familiarity the feeling of having been here before

2. noun informal

The tiresome sense that something happening now is a repeat of something that happened before.

“Another leadership crisis in October — it was deja vu all over again.”

repetition rerun

How to use deja vu

The word patterns that sound natural to a native speaker.

a sense of deja vu a feeling of deja vu experience deja vu deja vu all over again

Neutral; the 'tiresome repeat' sense is informal and often journalistic.

Etymology

From French déjà vu, literally 'already seen'.

Full origin of deja vu →

Frequently asked questions

What causes deja vu?

There is no single settled explanation. The leading accounts involve a brief mismatch in how the brain handles memory and recognition, so a new scene is tagged as familiar. It is common in healthy people, especially younger adults, and is only a medical concern when it is frequent and comes with other symptoms of seizure.

What is the difference between deja vu and jamais vu?

Deja vu is finding something new oddly familiar. Jamais vu is the reverse — a familiar word, face or place suddenly feeling completely strange, as when a common word stops looking like a real word.

Should it be written with accents?

In careful writing the French accents are usual: déjà vu. Plain deja vu is widely accepted in everyday English and is what most people type.

People also searched

repetition familiarity rerun

Nearby words

← Back to the full definition of deja vu