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’s the kind of sumptuous aural fantasia Ms. Ware has perfected, and it’s emblematic of “Superbloom” as a whole.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 21, 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
Beyoncé, “II Hands II Heaven” Months after “Cowboy Carter’s” release, this sprawling yet intricate electro-country fantasia still feels like it’s revealing itself.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 7, 2024
Then came the memory of Jules playing the piano, of Rubinstein’s Romance, of the ecstasy of his fantasia: the glittering rainbows and the souls turning to angels.
From Ecstasy: A Study of Happiness A Novel by Couperus, Louis
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
But in general, these brief fantasias meander into blandly showy runs.
From New York Times ● Oct. 27, 2022
When, at the head-centre, the lady demonstrator, armed with a Brobdingnagian whalebone needle, threaded with a bright red cord, executed herringboned fantasias on a canvas frame resembling a violin stand, it all looked easy enough.
From Ghetto Tragedies by Zangwill, Israel
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.
