Fairytale

How to spell fairytale

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fairytale

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fairytale mean?

1. nounA children's story featuring magical creatures and imaginary events, often beginning with a phrase like 'once upon a time'.
2. adjectiveResembling something from a magical story; idealised, romantic, or too perfect to seem real.

Fairytale in a sentence

• noun

  Every night she read her daughter a different fairytale about dragons and castles.

• adjective

  The couple celebrated their fairytale wedding in a restored country mansion.

• noun

  The museum exhibit traced how each classic fairytale changed across centuries of retelling.

• adjective

  After years of struggle, the small firm enjoyed a fairytale rise to success.

Where does fairytale come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a compound of two older words, fairy and tale. Fairy reached English through Old French faerie, meaning 'enchantment' or 'the realm of magical beings', which traces back to the Latin fata, the plural of fatum meaning 'that which has been spoken', and so 'fate' or 'destiny'; the Fates were goddesses who shaped human lives, and the sense drifted toward magical, otherworldly creatures. Tale is the native Germanic element, from Old English talu, which originally meant a 'telling', a 'reckoning', or an 'account', and is closely related to the word 'tell'. The two words were joined in the eighteenth century, largely as an English equivalent of the French phrase conte de fees, the kind of magical story collected and made fashionable by writers such as Charles Perrault. The spelling trap lies in remembering it is a single solid compound built from fairy plus tale, with the 'y' of fairy preserved in the middle, not 'fairy tail' (an animal's appendage) and not split apart.

How the word is built

• fairy (magical sprite, from Old French faerie)
• tale (story, from Old English talu)