Fantasies

How to spell fantasies

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fantasies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fantasies mean?

1. nounImagined situations, daydreams, or unrealistic wishes that exist only in the mind.

Fantasies in a sentence

• His elaborate fantasies about early retirement kept him going through dull meetings.

• The novel blends ordinary office life with the wild fantasies of its narrator.

Where does fantasies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word descends from the Greek phantasia, which literally meant 'a making visible' or 'appearance', built on the verb phainein, meaning 'to show' or 'to bring to light'. The Greek noun came to cover the faculty of the mind that forms mental images, and it passed into Latin as phantasia before travelling through Old French as fantasie. English adopted it in the 1300s, at first meaning a mental image or a whim, and over time it settled into the modern sense of imagined scenes and unrealistic wishes. The same phainein root lights up a surprising family of relatives, including 'phantom', 'phase', and even 'phenomenon'. The older spelling 'phantasy' with a ph- survives in some literary use, but the everyday form keeps the simpler f-, and the plural simply swaps the final -y for -ies.

How the word is built

• fantas- (from Greek phantasia: appearance, imagination)
• -ies (plural of -y)