fantastic
/fanˈtastɪk
/- This wonderful daughter, fantastic friend, and excellent pupil had secured a place at a top university.
- He has a wonderful wife, a fantastic job and two brilliant children.
- There will also be a raffle for fabulous prizes including a fantastic hamper, so come along and try your luck.
Synonyms
- Making them also uses a fantastic amount of water, far more than is used washing re-usable ones.
- It's wonderfully remote, with fantastic cliffs and big white sandy beaches.
- The great total of e260 was collected on the morning which is a fantastic amount.
- Everything in Ilija's work is unreal and ahistorical, fantastic and imaginative.
- There are ongoing sightings of sea-monsters and fantastic creatures lurking in the emerald green waters.
- Most contain fantastic elements, from Lucifer and Jesus to a field of talking cows.
Synonyms
- This island hosts a large number of strange-shaped stones and fantastic caves.
- But even as the light faded, strange and fantastic bird sounds came from every side.
- Palm trees swayed as the wind combed their leaves into flying crests like strange and fantastic coiffure.
Derivatives
fantastical
/ adjectivesense 2. ...- At other times it is difficult to envision the book's environs, wild and fantastical as they are.
- The enormous rotunda of Edinburgh's McEwan Hall is a fantastical, Victorian vision of the Italian Renaissance.
- What a pity that in the closing stages, as the plot becomes ever more fantastical, the stylistic and kinetic energy wanes, and the spell is broken.
fantasticality
- Between King Lear and these final plays, however, comes the oddly allegorical Cymbeline, a drama the gawky fantasticality of which betrays the poet's uneasy awareness that he stood at a psychological and spiritual crossroad.
- One presses forward along pathways and patterns heavy with ornamentation, as if groping through a mysterious maze, to engage ever more deeply with the visual inventions of this master of fantasticality.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'unreal'): from Old French fantastique, via medieval Latin from Greek phantastikos, from phantazein 'make visible', phantazesthai 'have visions, imagine', from phantos 'visible' (related to phainein 'to show'). From the 16th to the 19th cents the Latinized spelling phantastic was also used.
A word originally meaning ‘existing only in the imagination, unreal’ that comes from Greek phantastikos ‘vision’. Fantasy (Late Middle English) is of similar origin, as is fancy (Late Middle English), a contracted version of fantasy. The modern use of fantastic to mean ‘wonderful, excellent’ dates from the 1930s. The playful phrase trip the light fantastic, meaning ‘to dance’, goes back to John Milton's 1645 poem L'Allegro: ‘Come, and trip it as you go / On the light fantastic toe.’ Pant (Middle English) ‘to breath spasmodically’ goes back to the root verb of fantastic, phainon ‘to show’, via Old French pantaisier ‘be agitated, gasp’; as do phantom (Middle English) from phantasma ‘mere appearance’ and phenomenon (late 16th century) which meant ‘things appearing to view’ in the original Greek.
Rhymes
- captain's chair
- captain's table
- captan
- captanate
- captcha
- caption
- captious
- captiously
- captiousness
- captivate
- captivating
- captivatingly
- captivation
- captive
- captive balloon
- captivity
- captor
- capture
- capturer
- capture someone's imagination (or attention)
- capture-the-flag
- Capuchin
- capuchin monkey
- capybara
- car