fantasy

plural fantasies · alternative archaic phantasy · alternative obsolete phantasie

1. countableuncountableThat which comes from one's imagination or the act of imagining things.

   Is not this something more than fantasy?

   c. 1599–1602, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, London, act 1, scene 1

   3 more examples

   A thousand fantasies / Begin to throng into my memory.

   1634, John Milton, Comus

   The whole position was so tremendous and so absolutely unearthly, that I believe it actually lulled our sense of terror, but to this hour I often see it in my dreams, and at its mere phantasy wake up covered with cold sweat.

   1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC

   Try as hard as it can, empirical science cannot come up with a naturalistic explanation; it can only slip into fantasies that make scientists feel good because they are in harmony with their opinions, prejudices, and unconscious assumptions about the nature of reality.

   1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 92

2. countableuncountableliteratureThe literary genre generally dealing with themes of magic and the supernatural, imaginary worlds and creatures, etc.
3. countableuncountableA fantastical design.

   Embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread.

   1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 7, in The Scarlet Letter

4. countableslanguncountableThe drug gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.

present singular third person fantasies · participle present fantasying · participle past fantasied · past fantasied · alternative archaic phantasy · alternative obsolete phantasie

1. transitiveTo conceive (something) mentally; to imagine.
2. literarytransitivehuman sciencesTo fantasize about (something).

   Instead of phantasying marriage, she actually feels that she is already married to the man of her phantasy.

   1946, A. A. Brill, Lectures on Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, Alfred Knopf, page 127

   1 more example

   Perhaps I would be able to help him recapture the well-being and emotional closeness he fantasied his brother had experienced with his parents prior to his birth.

   2013, Mark J. Blechner, Hope and Mortality: Psychodynamic Approaches to AIDS and HIV

3. intransitiveTo conceive mentally; to imagine.

   Firſt I phantaſied that if I liſt to take vpon me the crowne and imperiall Scepter of the realme, now was the time propice and conuenient.

   1569, Richard Grafton, “Richarde the Thirde”, in A Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of Englande […], volume II, London: […] Henry Denham, […], for Richarde Tottle and Humffrey Toye, →OCLC, page 816

4. intransitiveobsoleteTo have a fancy for; to be pleased with; to like.

   Which he doth most fantasy.

   1551, Thomas More, “(please specify the Internet Archive page)”, in Raphe Robynson [i.e., Ralph Robinson], transl., A Fruteful, and Pleasaunt Worke of the Best State of a Publyque Weale, and of the Newe Yle Called Utopia: […], London: […] [Steven Mierdman for] Abraham Vele, […], →OCLC

   1 more example

   The kyng fantasied so much his daughter Anne that almost everything began to grow out of frame and good order

   1641, George Cavendish, Thomas Wolsey, Late Cardinall, his Lyffe and Deathe