Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Fantasy
/ˈfæntəsi/noun
Imagined experience that is pleasant rather than true, or a genre of fiction set in invented worlds.
The Greek roots
φαντασία
phantasía
appearance, imagination
Literally: “a making visible”
Follow a root:φαντασία4 words
The story of the word
Φαντασία is built on φαίνειν, to bring to light, and for Aristotle it was a technical term: the faculty that holds an image after the senses have stopped supplying it. English took it through Latin and French around 1300. Fancy is the same word, worn down in the fifteenth century, which is why fantasy and fancy still mean nearly the same thing at different levels of seriousness.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
fancyphantomphenomenonepiphany
In a sentence
The plan was less a strategy than a fantasy with a spreadsheet attached.