Elusive or illusive or allusive? Commonly confused words (17-18)

(17 & 18 of 44 commonly confused words)

Takeaways—for busy people

• Beware of writing illusive when you mean that something or someone is hard to find, pin down, or define. The correct word and spelling is elusive.

Correct: Yet happiness is an elusive concept, rather like love. Incorrect: Sharks up to forty feet are quite common, although when Helen was there they proved to be X illusive.

• • If you use Word, the spelling and grammar check will query illusive. 
  • If you want to suggest that something is an illusion, illusory is much more frequent than illusive, and a safer choice (readers will be in no doubt about what you mean):

Correct: …a Buddhist monk advised him, “You must first realize the illusory nature of your own body”. In written texts, X illusive is more often used by mistake than in its true meaning, though many examples are ambiguous.

• The word allusive is also occasionally used by mistake for elusive.
• This post gives plenty of examples of appropriate and mistaken use.
• If you feel confident that you already know all this, why not try the self-test at the bottom of the blog?

For the full story, read on…

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Why does the mistake happen?

The reason seems pretty obvious: the words sound the same: i-l(y)oo-siv (/ɪˈl(j)uːsɪv/.) If you don’t edit your writing carefully the mistake could slip through, because your spellchecker might accept illusive as a legitimate word. Which it is, but, very often, probably not the one you meant!

What is the difference? Elusive…

relates to the verb ‘to elude’. So, something elusive eludes or escapes you, is difficult to grasp physically or mentally. Things that are often elusive are creatures, foes, beasts…and Justin Timberlake. If people describe him as elusive, that means he is hard to track down and photograph or interview; if they were chasing the illusive Justin Timberlake, they would be implying something about his very existence, or about his skill at creating illusions. If people describe a concept as elusive, they mean it is hard to pin down, explain, or define; if they describe it as X illusive, they may possibly mean that it is indeed an illusion, but as often as not it is the wrong word choice. In the next example the appropriate word has been used: If the situation in western Pakistan continues to deteriorate, success will be elusive and very difficult to achieve.

What about illusive?

It means, as the Collins Dictionary puts it, ‘producing, produced by, or based on illusion; deceptive or unreal’. It has a rather literary ring to it, as in Sir Walter Scott’s:

’Tis now a vain illusive show, That melts whene’er the sunbeams glow.

Modern examples include:

…a film essay about the real and illusive nature of motion pictures.

(after all, films produce an illusion in the mind of the viewer);

Gaskell [i.e. Mrs Gaskell, the novelist] did not sentimentalize or yield to the illusive attractions of the English pastoral idyll.

(the attractions were indeed an illusion, since country life was harsh and poverty-stricken).

Illusive by mistake

However, the data in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) demonstrate how often illusive appears by mistake for elusive. A roughly 10-per cent sample (50 examples) of all examples of illusive contained 23 in which illusive was clearly a mistake:

…but even after a decade, his [i.e. Ricardo Chailly’s] musical character remains strangely X illusive and lacking any special definition.

(The intended meaning must be ‘hard to define’ and therefore should be elusive);

During the long period we spent waiting for this X illusive good weather, there was also tragedy on the mountain.—Everest Expedition dispatches

(My reading is that the good weather came only sporadically, but the sentence is conceivably ambiguous). Of the other 28 examples, only 12 unequivocally used—at least by my reading—the true meaning of illusive:

…this illusive common interest, this notion of shared stakes encompassed the whole world and large majorities in almost every society .—Free India Media

(The left-leaning nature of the text suggests that common interest between the ruling classes and the ruled is indeed an illusion). But 15 were ambiguous to me, and in some cases it was impossible to work out quite what the writer intended:

After a troubled season at Arsenal, Bergkamp was his illusive best on Friday night, dropping off Kluivert and playing a part in almost all of Holland’s better moments.—Sunday Herald, 2000

Was Bergkamp hard to pin down and tackle, or a master of illusion through feints? The Corpus of Web-Based Global English (GloWbE) presents a similar picture.  For example, a search for illusive and any words following within three spaces yields this top ten:

man, quality, power, concept, nature, dream, leopard, creatures, happiness, desire.

Nearly all the quotations for man are for the ‘Illusive Man’ in a video game. I have no idea whether the word is a deliberate pun in this context.

Of the remainder, quality, concept, leopard, and creatures self-evidently match elusive. 

Dream and desire similarly correspond to illusive; 

Power, nature, and happiness could go with either, but in the GloWbE contexts are appropriately described as illusive. 

illusive/illusory

Illusory has the same definition as illusive. According to the OED, it was first recorded in a letter of 1599 by no less a personage than Elizabeth I (though it looks like a noun), and then by John Donne.

• To trust him uppon pledges is a meare illusorye.—1599
• A false, an illusory, and a sinfull comfort.—Sermons, X. 51, before 1631

Illusive appeared nearly a century later (1679) according to the OED, in the blood-curdlingly titled The narrative of Robert Jenison, containing 1. A further discovery and confirmation of the late popish plot. 2. The names of the four ruffians, designed to have murthered the king…

Illusive or illusory: which is it better to use?

If you really mean to convey the idea that something is an illusion, I’d be tempted to go for illusory, as the more common word, and in order to dispel any suspicion that you meant elusive. In the OEC it is roughly eight times more frequent than illusive:

‘…they give the Palestinians the illusory feeling that via a unilateral strategy and parliamentary resolutions they can obtain their political aspirations,’ foreign ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon told The Irish Times.

So that’s that all sorted out, then

If only… Another word (a near homophone) sometimes gets snarled up in this tangle of meaning. It is allusive, the adjective corresponding to ‘allusion’ and used mainly by literary critics, film critics, and the like. Some poetry, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, is highly allusive, since it constantly alludes (i.e. refers indirectly) to other texts, poetic or otherwise.

Although there is no question that Ulysses provided a supreme example of the allusive method in action, deployed on a breathtaking scale, Eliot’s almost insatiable appetite for allusion sprang from other sources as well.—T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush, 1991

But people occasionally use it by mistake. I heard the pronunciation ‘allusive’ referring to whales in a recent BBC trailer for a nature programme. And if you search for ‘The Allusive Butterfly of Love’ online you will find quite a few examples.

More mistaken examples:

• Picking up a taxi from Epping tube station, it was another half an hour finding the X allusive final destination.—Ideas Factory
• Give John Kerry this. He’s maddeningly X allusive.

Given the prevailing muddle over the meaning of these words, it is perhaps not surprising that one has to turn to literary titans to see them used with absolute precision: at a conference in August 2004, Vikram Seth memorably and alliteratively defined writing as ‘allusive, elusive and illusive’.

Test yourself. Go on, you know you want to.

Choose between allusive, elusive, and illusory:

1. Although his restless experimentation and complex, _________ style often prove difficult on first reading, his novels possess a complexity and depth that reward the demands he makes upon his readers.
2. Dylan is notoriously _________; as he wrote on the album notes to Highway 61 Revisited , ‘there is no I—there is only a series of mouths.’
3. The hint that the possibility exists for real and not _________ happiness and love appears fleetingly in a few of Sirk’s earlier Universal-International films.
4. ...the Convention is interpreted and applied in a manner which renders its rights practical and effective, not theoretical and _________.
5. But in one area, success is _________: The city’s rats remain as bold and showy as ever, darting through well-lighted subway stations as…

1. allusive 2. elusive 3. illusory 4. illusory 5. elusive/illusory

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Note: This is an updated example of a post published previously.