Fantasy

How to spell fantasy

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fantasy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fantasy mean?

1. nounAn imaginative or fanciful idea, often one that is unrealistic or wished for rather than real.
2. nounA genre of fiction featuring magic, mythical creatures, and imaginary worlds.

Fantasy in a sentence

• Winning the lottery was a pleasant fantasy that got him through dull afternoons.

• The bookshop devotes an entire shelf to epic fantasy with dragons and wizards.

• The idea of retiring at forty remained pure fantasy given their mortgage.

• He writes fantasy novels set in invented kingdoms.

Where does fantasy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek phantasia, which meant 'a making visible' or 'appearance', and by extension the faculty of the mind that forms images. That noun grew from the verb phantazein, 'to make visible', itself rooted in phainein, 'to show' or 'to bring to light'. Latin took it in as phantasia, and Old French reshaped it as fantasie before English adopted it in the 1300s, originally meaning a mental image or a whim. Over the centuries the sense drifted from 'imagination as a mental power' toward 'a fanciful or unreal invention', and later named a whole literary genre. The same Greek root that gave us 'show' also produced the related word 'phantom', which is why the spelling can feel slippery: in English the opening sound settled on a plain 'f' rather than the 'ph' its Greek cousins kept.

How the word is built

• fantas- (from Greek phantasia: appearance, image, imagination)
• -y (noun suffix)