Fanciful

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Fanciful \Fan"ci*ful\, a.
     1. Full of fancy; guided by fancy, rather than by reason and
        experience; whimsical; as, a fanciful man forms visionary
        projects.
        [1913 Webster]
  


     2. Conceived in the fancy; not consistent with facts or
        reason; abounding in ideal qualities or figures; as, a
        fanciful scheme; a fanciful theory.
        [1913 Webster]
  
     3. Curiously shaped or constructed; as, she wore a fanciful
        headdress.
        [1913 Webster]
  
              Gather up all fancifullest shells.    --Keats.
  
     Syn: Imaginative; ideal; visionary; capricious; chimerical;
          whimsical; fantastical; wild.
  
     Usage: {Fanciful}, {Fantastical}, {Visionary}. We speak of
            that as fanciful which is irregular in taste and
            judgment; we speak of it as fantastical when it
            becomes grotesque and extravagant as well as
            irregular; we speak of it as visionary when it is
            wholly unfounded in the nature of things. Fanciful
            notions are the product of a heated fancy, without any
            tems are made up of oddly assorted fancies, aften of
            the most whimsical kind; visionary expectations are
            those which can never be realized in fact. --
            {Fan"ci*ful*ly}, adv. -{Fan"ci*ful*ness}, n.
            [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  fanciful
       adj 1: indulging in or influenced by fancy; "a fanciful mind"; "all
              the notional vagaries of childhood" [syn: {notional}]
       2: not based on fact; dubious; "the falsehood about some
          fanciful secret treaties"- F.D.Roosevelt; "a small child's
          imaginary friends"; "her imagined fame"; "to create a
          notional world for oneself" [syn: {imaginary}, {imagined},
           {notional}]
       3: having a curiously intricate quality; "a fanciful pattern
          with intertwined vines and flowers"

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  109 Moby Thesaurus words for "fanciful":
     Gothic, absurd, air-built, airy, antic, apocryphal, arbitrary,
     baroque, bizarre, brain-born, capricious, changeable, chimerical,
     cloud-built, conceptual, cranky, crotchety, curious, dream-built,
     dreamlike, ethereal, extravagant, fabulous, false, fancied,
     fancy-born, fancy-built, fancy-woven, fantasied, fantasque,
     fantastic, fatuitous, fatuous, fickle, fictional, fictitious,
     fictive, flaky, florid, freakish, gaseous, gossamery, grotesque,
     harebrained, humorsome, ideal, ideational, ideological, illusory,
     imaginary, imaginative, imagined, immaterial, impossible,
     impulsive, incomprehensible, inconceivable, inconstant, incredible,
     kinky, legendary, maggoty, make-believe, merely nominal, moody,
     motiveless, mythical, not real, notional, odd, original,
     outlandish, peculiar, petulant, phantomlike, preposterous, quirky,
     rarefied, rococo, shadowy, spirituous, subtile, subtle,
     supposititious, temperamental, tenuous, theoretical, unaccountable,
     unactual, unbelievable, unexpected, unimaginable, unreal,
     unrealistic, unreasonable, unrestrained, unsubstantial, unusual,
     vagarious, vagrant, vaporous, variable, visionary, wanton, wayward,
     whimsical, wild, windy, wrong