the.com/phantom limb pain

means The sensation of pain or other feeling seeming to come from a limb that has been amputated or was never there, because the brain's body-map still represents it.

from Not a word coined through linguistic drift but a clinical term: 'phantom' comes from Greek 'phantasma,' meaning an apparition or thing made visible — used here because the limb appears, sensorially, to still exist though the eye finds nothing. The concept was named and seriously studied in the 1800s by physicians treating amputees from war wounds, most notably the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who gave the phenomenon its enduring label. The phrase simply joins that ghostly 'phantom' to the plain anatomical 'limb' and the plain sensory 'pain' — no hidden trick, just medicine reaching for the nearest honest metaphor.