Standard Lemma guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
No pronunciation record was provided for this word.
noun
A field of military technology dealing with electronic weapons or devices used to either degrade or enhance human health by directed energy.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
noun
Synonym of parapsychology.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: parapsychology
Antonyms: none provided
History
Blend of psycho- + electronics, on the model of French psychotronique coined by Fernand Clerc as "use of thought and will"; Clerc's term was popularized by the magazine Toute la Radio in January 1955, which speculated on the possibility of telekinesis. In the late 1960s, the term was popular among parapsychology researchers of the socialist bloc (particularly Zdeněk Rejdák), used instead of parapsychology to avoid its negative connotations, and because the term analogized parapsychology to bionics. The term was then popularized in western world during the second half of the Cold War by science fiction and fears of mind control. By surface analysis, psycho- + -tronics.
