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:
Twenty years from now, as sports viewing evolves into a fragmented, multisensory fantasia, that reality may not be real enough.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 12, 2026
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
The germ of an edgy fantasia about an isolated pop icon’s ego death is swimming somewhere in the DNA of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” but it’s been flattened into a superficial, tear-stained pity party.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 16, 2025
It is a magic lantern fantasia with an occasional muskeg to represent the waits between views.
From Seeds of Pine by Janey Canuck
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
Visually, many of Beeple’s pictures mimic the Japanese Gothic fantasias of video games.
From New York Times ● Mar. 12, 2021
The Hungarian Rhapsodies, on the other hand, which are still more fantasias on the adopted matter than the operatic transcriptions, continue to be favourites of the virtuosi and the public.
From Franz Liszt by James Huneker
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