imago

Imago, imaginis is feminine, third declension, stem imagin-. Its range is wider than English "image": a portrait or statue, a reflection, a ghost or apparition, an echo, and in rhetoric a simile.

The sharpest classical use is social. The imagines maiorum were wax masks of ancestors who had held high office, kept in the atrium and carried in family funeral processions by actors wearing them, so the number of imagines a house owned was a public count of its standing. A novus homo had none, and that was the insult. Medieval scribes routinely spell the word ymago with a y, which is why the corpus shows both. English image, imagine and imaginary all come through French from it.