fabulous
/ˈfabjʊləs
/- The scams offer fabulous riches or the love of your life, but first the magha has to send a series of escalating fees and payments.
- All the fabulous items and riches so earnestly sought and viciously competed for over the years, will be gone.
- While the workers and the middle class of the great cities perished in misery, Stinnes became the owner of fabulous riches.
Synonyms
- There's some truly fabulous stuff in these wonderful emporiums.
- The champagne flowed, the food was fabulous, the company wonderful.
- I could pick any game, he's just been a fabulous influence and a wonderful player for his country.
Synonyms
- Reality is airbrushed and we're given promises of fabulous, mythical oases of futurity.
- For thousands of years fabulous serpents and dragons have been the stuff of myth and traveller's tales.
- It is said that from the dense forests nearby, wild beasts and fabulous birds like rocs harassed the Bagan people.
Synonyms
Derivatives
fabulosity
/ noun ...- But at the newspaper, where everybody is a class valedictorian or expects to be treated like one, the savvy thing for the new editor to do is to come in and proclaim the paper is fabulous and that we will lead it to greater fabulosity.
- I never used to feel fabulous or truly at peace with myself… but you are one of the people who've helped me find that inner fabulosity within myself and let it come out.
- The bald truth about these inventories, known to anyone who does achieve true fabulosity by age 30, is the only list worth adhering to is one of your own devising.
fabulousness
- Of course I'd gotten it online, a fabulous price at a fabulous place that required prepayment for all this fabulousness, and imposed a one-night penalty for a cancellation within 24 hours.
- I own several scruffy-looking fleece tops that make me feel cheap and shabby whenever I wear them, so I was on the lookout for warm and slinky knitwear to help bring out my inner fabulousness.
- I'd love to see New York from a native's eyes, just to take all that gigantic fabulousness for granted.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'known through fable'): from French fabuleux or Latin fabulosus 'celebrated in fable', from fabula (see fable).
The Latin word fabula ‘story’, ultimately from fari, meaning ‘to speak’, is the source of both fabulous and fable (Middle English), and perhaps of fib (mid 16th century), which may be a shortening of the obsolete fible-fable ‘nonsense’. A fable is a short story which conveys a moral, and is particularly associated with the legendary 6th-century bc Greek storyteller Aesop, whose fables have given the language many expressions (see, for example, at chicken). In early use fabulous meant ‘known through fable’ or ‘not based on fact’. The idea of ‘astonishing’ led to it being understood as both ‘beyond belief’ and ‘wonderful, marvellous’. As the 60s started to swing, fabulous was shortened to fab, and the Beatles were nicknamed the Fab Four, while in the 1990s TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous (sometimes shortened to Ab Fab), ‘Fabulous, sweetie!’ was the standard encouragement. See also fate