notional

adj

1. Of, containing, or being a notion; mental or imaginary.

   “Near-synonyms: conceptual, fancied, fanciful, ideal”

   “The idea that a rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo rather than ooh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh is socially conventional even though its sound correspondence is at heart notional.”

   “He was now receiving reports of a second suspect Anglo Leasing deal, this time for the notional provision of a state-of-the-art police forensic laboratory.”

2. Speculative, theoretical, not the result of research.

   “This paper proposes a notional Federated Identity Management (FIM) architecture.”

3. (Maine)Stubborn.
4. Having descriptive value as opposed to a syntactic category.
5. Used to indicate an estimate or a reference amount

   “Gold traded at $909.00 an ounce, up 0.2 percent from New York's notional close of $906.65 on Wednesday.”

   “Under the agreements, Harvard paid the banks fixed interest rates on a total notional amount of $3.52 billion in exchange for floating-rate payments from them.”

6. (informal)Full of ideas or imaginings.

   “She knew what Pete would say if she told him about it — he would say she was getting notional; and she did not want Pete to think of her as a notional woman. Notional women sometimes had a hard time marrying unless they had money.”

noun

1. A fake company used as a front in espionage.

   “Numerous CIA notionals, created to counter Communist organizations in Western Europe during the Cold War years, remain active and unrevealed.”