tasavvur

Tasavvur is a noun used in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other languages to denote a mental image, conception, or imagination. It derives from the Arabic word tasawwur (تصور), formed from a root associated with forming or shaping, and has circulated through Persian and Turkish via literary and scholarly contact.

The term covers a range of meanings: the act of imagining or forming a mental image; the content of such imagination as a mental representation; and more broadly, a notion, concept, or assumption about something. In everyday speech, tasavvur can refer to both the process of imagining and the resulting idea or belief.

In scholarly usage, especially within Islamic philosophy and theology, tasavvur is used to describe how the mind conceives or grasps an object or idea, often as a preliminary stage before judgment or inference. It is sometimes contrasted with other mental activities such as contemplation or deduction, though the exact distinctions vary by tradition.

In modern Turkish, Persian, and Urdu, tasavvur remains common for both imaginative possibilities and cognitive concepts, whereas more vivid or fictional imagining is often expressed with khayal. The word also appears in discussions of perception and cognitive representation in contemporary psychology and linguistics when describing how people form mental images or notions of objects and events.