Dictionary

nulliverse en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (UK) audio

Etymology

From null + -i- + -verse, coined by William James.

Meanings

1. The world, regarded as having no rationality or rules.
   • And Huw is abruptly ejected from whatever pocket nulliverse the Prophet’s fifth column have installed in the lobby of the virtual Tripoli Mariott, to a destination even more profoundly alienating than the cloud itself. 2012, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds, Tor Books, page 291:
   • If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose haphazard sway I will not truckle. 1882 April, William James, “On Some Hegelisms”, in Mind, volume VII, number 1, page 192:
   • Now, why should an author not create a “nulliverse” to represent “oneirologically” the contents of his own mind? 1969 August 2, John Updike, “Books: Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van”, in The New Yorker, volume 45, number 24, page 67:
   • You admit yourself that I am only a pale wild girl with gipsy hair in a deathless ballad, in a nulliverse, in Rattner's ‘menald world’ where the only principle is random variation. 1969, Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle:
   • ... one of the infinite seas that swim in a bubble of a phenomenal ocean where there are no longer any stars because the stars have lost their name: the nulliverse, and wondering if Bustrófedon's sentity was expanding multiversally, ... 2004, Donald Gardner, Suzanne Jill Levine (tr.), Three Trapped Tigers, Dalkey Archive Press, translation of Tres Tristes Tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, published 1967, page 480:
   • If rationality be in it at all, it must be in it throughout ; if irrationality be in it anywhere, that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or pure nulliverse ; and reduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought long to remain doubtful. 1909, William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures to Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, Longmans, Green, and Company, page 68:

Forms

Relateds

multiverse

wikipedia: William James