deja vu

noun

1. Psychology. the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time.
2. disagreeable familiarity or sameness: The new television season had a sense of déjà vu about it—the same old plots and characters with new names.

noun

1. the experience of perceiving a new situation as if it had occurred before. It is sometimes associated with exhaustion or certain types of mental disorder

1903, from French déjà vu, literally “already seen.” The phenomenon also is known as promnesia. Similar phenomena are déjà entendu “already heard” (of music, etc.), 1965; and déjà lu “already read.”

The strange sensation that something one is now experiencing has happened before: “I knew I had never been in the house before, but as I walked up the staircase, I got a weird sense of déjà vu.” From French, meaning “already seen.”