Pareidolia comes from the Greek para- ("beside", "with", or "alongside", in this context meaning something faulty or wrong, as in paraphasia, disordered speech) and eidōlon ("image"; the diminutive of eidos – "image", "form", "shape") is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.