[syn: fanciful, imaginary, notional]
3. having a curiously intricate quality;
- Example: "a fanciful pattern with intertwined vines and flowers"
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Fanciful \Fan"ci*ful\, a.
1. Full of fancy; guided by fancy, rather than by reason and
experience; whimsical; as, a fanciful man forms visionary
projects.
[1913 Webster]
2. Conceived in the fancy; not consistent with facts or
reason; abounding in ideal qualities or figures; as, a
fanciful scheme; a fanciful theory.
[1913 Webster]
3. Curiously shaped or constructed; as, she wore a fanciful
headdress.
[1913 Webster]
Gather up all fancifullest shells. --Keats.
Syn: Imaginative; ideal; visionary; capricious; chimerical;
whimsical; fantastical; wild.
Usage: Fanciful, Fantastical, Visionary. We speak of
that as fanciful which is irregular in taste and
judgment; we speak of it as fantastical when it
becomes grotesque and extravagant as well as
irregular; we speak of it as visionary when it is
wholly unfounded in the nature of things. Fanciful
notions are the product of a heated fancy, without any
tems are made up of oddly assorted fancies, aften of
the most whimsical kind; visionary expectations are
those which can never be realized in fact. --
Fan"ci*ful*ly, adv. -Fan"ci*ful*ness, n.
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
fanciful
adj 1: indulging in or influenced by fancy; "a fanciful mind";
"all the notional vagaries of childhood" [syn:
fanciful, notional]
2: not based on fact; unreal; "the falsehood about some fanciful
secret treaties"- F.D.Roosevelt; "a small child's imaginary
friends"; "to create a notional world for oneself" [syn:
fanciful, imaginary, notional]
3: having a curiously intricate quality; "a fanciful pattern
with intertwined vines and flowers"
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:
109 Moby Thesaurus words for "fanciful":
Gothic, absurd, air-built, airy, antic, apocryphal, arbitrary,
baroque, bizarre, brain-born, capricious, changeable, chimerical,
cloud-built, conceptual, cranky, crotchety, curious, dream-built,
dreamlike, ethereal, extravagant, fabulous, false, fancied,
fancy-born, fancy-built, fancy-woven, fantasied, fantasque,
fantastic, fatuitous, fatuous, fickle, fictional, fictitious,
fictive, flaky, florid, freakish, gaseous, gossamery, grotesque,
harebrained, humorsome, ideal, ideational, ideological, illusory,
imaginary, imaginative, imagined, immaterial, impossible,
impulsive, incomprehensible, inconceivable, inconstant, incredible,
kinky, legendary, maggoty, make-believe, merely nominal, moody,
motiveless, mythical, not real, notional, odd, original,
outlandish, peculiar, petulant, phantomlike, preposterous, quirky,
rarefied, rococo, shadowy, spirituous, subtile, subtle,
supposititious, temperamental, tenuous, theoretical, unaccountable,
unactual, unbelievable, unexpected, unimaginable, unreal,
unrealistic, unreasonable, unrestrained, unsubstantial, unusual,
vagarious, vagrant, vaporous, variable, visionary, wanton, wayward,
whimsical, wild, windy, wrong