fantasia
Americannoun
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Music.
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a composition in fanciful or irregular form or style.
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a potpourri of well-known airs arranged with interludes and florid embellishments.
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something considered to be unreal, weird, exotic, or grotesque.
noun
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any musical composition of a free or improvisatory nature
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a potpourri of popular tunes woven freely into a loosely bound composition
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another word for fancy
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of fantasia
From Italian, dating back to 1715–25; see origin at fantasy
Explanation
A fantasia is a partially improvised, free flowing piece of music. Familiar tunes are often included in a fantasia. You might hear a fantasia at the symphony, scattered with well-known bits of folk songs. Most fantasias are a bit unpredictable, since they tend to use improvisation and an unstructured style, with classical fantasias sometimes mixing fast sections with much slower ones. Fantasia is also the title of the third animated Disney film, made in 1940 and featuring cartoons set to eight pieces of classical music. The Greek root of both fantasia and fantasy is phantasia — "imagination or appearance."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In 2019, then-Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said City were in "fantasia land", where they could buy whoever they wanted.
From BBC ● May 19, 2026
It has gone through many incarnations, including a mid-1990s renovation that led to its current, even more over-the-top state as a Czarist fantasia.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 12, 2026
In the second half, an early 20th century oddball fantasia for four violas by British composer/violist York Bowen was preceded a gripping performance of the First Sextet.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 25, 2025
One chapter looks at a literary example, William Wells Brown’s novel "Clotel," which is something of a fantasia on the Sally Hemings story.
From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024
But Davy fell back into the folds of the curtain, frowning, not at the young lady, but at the fantasia.
From Charles Auchester, Volume 1 of 2 by Sheppard, Elizabeth
In Krúdy’s fantasias, the yearning for the past is really a yearning for one’s lost youth.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 8, 2026
Its music videos, which had heretofore been so art-school obscure that MTV barely played them, were now high-budget fantasias with Stipe front and center, undulating like a Robert Longo painting come to life.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 5, 2024
Fusing the bare-bones folk of his beloved 2015 album Carrie & Lowell to the grand, orchestral fantasias of his earlier work, Javelin saw Sufjan Stevens reach new heights.
From BBC ● Dec. 27, 2023
This included several fantasias, wide-ranging in style, by Orlando Gibbons and the harmonically adventurous William Lawes.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 17, 2019
Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas—not, however, faded in his time.
From Old Fogy His Musical Opinions and Grotesques by Huneker, James
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
