fantasia
Americannoun
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fantasias
plural
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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
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
What happened, of course, was this: a glittering disco-soul fantasia that still ranks as one of the greatest album openers in pop history.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 4, 2024
"His fantasia, half prose as it is, is beautiful ... all through there is the spirit of the Magic Flute and at times almost the music."
From A Modern Symposium by G. Lowes (Goldsworthy Lowes) Dickinson
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
Rose Mary was a prolific artist who produced all kinds of paintings — rural landscapes, urban scenes, abstract fantasias, portraits, still lifes — but she could not bear to part with them.
From New York Times ● Mar. 18, 2023
Then follows one of the most difficult staccato fantasias in existence, for the voice imitates the tinkle of that silver bell.
From Stars of the Opera by Mabel Wagnalls
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.
