fantasy means that which comes from one's imagination or the act of imagining things. It carries an Arena rating of 1395, earned across 5 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, fantasy ranks #2,503 of 17,052 for Most Whimsical Words, #2,787 of 17,052 for Most Malleable Words, #3,508 of 17,052 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #7,641 of 17,052 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words.
fantasy is pronounced /ˈfæntəsi/.
Why “fantasy” is a great word
Fantasy is the capacity or product of forming images, narratives, or desires that are fanciful, escapist, or unrestrained by reality, as well as a genre of fiction centered on magical and supernatural elements. From Middle English fantasie, from Old French fantasie, from Latin phantasia, from Ancient Greek φαντασία (phantasía, “appearance, image, perception, imagination”), from φαντάζω (phantázō, “I make visible”). Unlike "imagination," the broad faculty of forming new ideas, or "fancy," a capricious whim, fantasy implies a deliberate, sustained departure into the unreal. It is the whispered promise of a dragon’s hoard, the meticulous geography of a map whose continents do not exist, the lover constructing an entire future from a stranger’s glance on a train—the human spirit’s quiet rebellion against the tyranny of the actual, a refusal to accept that what is seen is all there is.
noun
- That which comes from one's imagination or the act of imagining things.e.g.“Is not this something more than fantasy?”
- The literary genre generally dealing with themes of magic and the supernatural, imaginary worlds and creatures, etc.
- A fantastical design.e.g.“Embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread.”
- The drug gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.
verb
- To conceive (something) mentally; to imagine.
- To fantasize about something).e.g.“Perhaps I would be able to help him recapture the well-being and emotional closeness he fantasied his brother had experienced with his parents prior to his birth.”
- To conceive mentally; to imagine.
- To have a fancy for; to be pleased with; to like.e.g.“Which he doth most fantasy.”
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.