Fantastic

How to spell fantastic

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fantastic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fantastic mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely good, impressive, or enjoyable.
2. adjectiveExisting only in the imagination; strange, unreal, or hard to believe.

Fantastic in a sentence

• The team did a fantastic job finishing the project ahead of schedule.

• The novel describes a fantastic world of floating cities and talking rivers.

• We had a fantastic time at the coastal resort last summer.

• His account of the accident was so fantastic that the police doubted it.

Where does fantastic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek phantastikos, meaning 'able to present or imagine', which was built on phantazein, 'to make visible', and ultimately on phantasma, 'an image or apparition'. It travelled into Late Latin as phantasticus and then into Old French as fantastique before reaching English in the late 1300s. For centuries it meant 'existing only in the imagination' or 'wildly unreal', describing visions, dreams and far-fetched ideas; the modern colloquial sense of 'wonderful' or 'excellent' is a much later, casual extension. The same Greek phantasma also gives us 'phantom' and 'fantasy', which explains the silent flavour of that 'ph' family even though English smoothed it to a plain 'f' here. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle syllable and the '-tic' ending, which writers sometimes drift toward '-tick'.

How the word is built

• fantas- (from Greek phantazein: to make visible, to imagine)
• -tic (adjective suffix)