jamais vu.

A feeling that a genuinely familiar person, place, or object is strangely unfamiliar.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• an episode of jamais vu
• a sense of jamais vu

On the page

Jamais vu made the familiar staircase feel like a passage she had never entered.

She recognized the address while the sense of jamais vu kept the doorway foreign.

Usage notes

Primary category: horror. Forms: Usually uncountable accepted borrowing. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.