Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use fanciful in a sentence

25 example sentences · adjective

Fanciful means imaginative or fantastic; ignoring reality. Example: “It was fanciful to suppose that all he had to do would be to stride into a top law firm and he would be hired on the spot.”

Examples of fanciful by meaning

adjectiveImaginative or fantastic; ignoring reality.

  • It was fanciful to suppose that all he had to do would be to stride into a top law firm and he would be hired on the spot.
  • Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” treats his newest novelistic conceit as an occasion to toss every possible ingredient into a fanciful hellscape and then let these elements run wild.2009 September 7, Janet Maslin, “News at Styx: Who’s Hot in Hades”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 31 Aug 2021

More sentences with fanciful

  • The fanciful range of costumes they created together begins with a spin through French costume history.2005 January, Cynthia Rose, “Pain Couture (High-Fashion Bread)”, in Crafts, number 192, Crafts Council, via EBSCOhost, →ISSN, page 58. From the entry langue de chat
  • Hitler later devised a fanciful plan to recoronate the duke King of England.2001, Richard Layman, Julie M. Rivett, editors, Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921–1960, Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, →ISBN…. From the entry recoronate
  • An artist's fanciful conception of a superplant of the future produced through the processes of DNA technology.2000, I. Edward Alcamo, DNA Technology: The Awesome Skill, page 260. From the entry superplant
  • In fanciful language, if our universe is nondegenerate, then so will be almost every world in it.1995, Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston, and Jerry R. Green, Microeconomic Theory, Oxford University Press, page 595. From the entry nondegenerate
  • The doors were carved by the village craftsmen who were fanciful decorationists.1981, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, as Patron of the Arts, page 49. From the entry decorationist
  • To popular literature belong the fanciful novels called skazki, which resemble somewhat the stories of the Fates.1912, A[urelio] Palmieri, “Russia”, in Charles G[eorge] Herbermann, Edward A[loysius] Pace, Condé B[enoist] Pallen, Thomas J[oseph]…. From the entry Baba-Iaga
  • It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.1908, George Saintsbury -, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, page 267. From the entry polypragmatism
  • Huang’s counter-narrative, however, is also a bit fanciful.2026 February 21, Mike Pearl, “Obedient Traders Respond to Claude Code Cybersecurity Plugin by Selling Cybersecurity Stocks”, in Gizmodo…. From the entry SaaSpocalypse
  • The connection between sporting activities and social rank is given a fanciful expression in the aforementioned The Boke of St.2003, Thomas S. Henricks, “Sport in the Later Middle Ages”, in Eric Dunning, Dominic Malcolm, editors, Sport (Critical Concepts in…. From the entry merlon
  • Elsewhere there are Victwardian street lamps, cute signs shaped like miniature Belvedere towers, and fanciful strings of lights.1993, Catherine Ormell, “Perspective: Sculpture at Chelsea Harbour”, in World Architecture, number 24, →ISSN, page 91. From the entry Victwardian
  • A Learical Lexicon is a fanciful collection of words invented by the great, gay limerist and word diddler, Edward Lear.1985 August 24, Michael Bronski, “Titles of Interest from the Mainstream Press”, in Gay Community News, volume 13, number 7, page 11. From the entry limerist
  • Inside a border of fanciful Morrocan ormentation was inscribed in elaborate script the name of the smokeasy: “Au Contraire.”1979, Albert Harry Goldman, Grass Roots: Marijuana in America Today, Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 14. From the entry smokeasy
  • Biologists and artists later proposed alternatives, albeit fanciful, that were more plausibly dinosaurlike and less biased towards the form of our own species.2023 June 7, Massimo Sandal, “How Smart Were Dinosaurs? New Studies Fuel the Debate”, in Scientific American. From the entry dinosaurlike
  • Villanelle's kills are being ordered by the sort of shady extragovernmental organisation that might have seemed fanciful in a time before we'd heard of polonium.2018 September 2, Benji Wilson, “Jodie Comer on Killing Eve — the new TV series from Fleabag writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge”, in The Times…. From the entry extragovernmental
  • I see them as she sees them: a load of rubbish, fanciful nonsense from a person who has watched one too many cop shows.2015, Dorothy Koomson, “Smitty”, in That Girl from Nowhere, London: Arrow Books, Penguin Random House, published 2016, →ISBN, page 415. From the entry question mark
  • The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread.2004, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 3, in The Line of Beauty […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 54. From the entry finial
  • “Papillons” follows Schumann’s Opus 1 (the “Abegg Variations”) and serves as prototype for the fanciful pianistic storytelling and the fragmentary necklacelike format that would occupy his early work.2008 March 7, Bernard Holland, “Pianistic Tales, Fanciful and Eccentric”, in New York Times. From the entry necklacelike
  • Modern children, having only machine-made glass marbles, are restricted to names describing their size, or the names under which they are sold, or fanciful names of their own inventing.1997, Iona Archibald Opie, Peter Opie, Children's games with things, page 54. From the entry bosser
  • His grandson, the extravagant Emperor Chien Lung, greatly enlarged the retreat into an imperial playground five miles in circumference, with fanciful palaces set in pine-forested hills around a lake.1992, Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China, Papermac, published 1993, →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 59–60. From the entry Jehol
  • THE sailors’ inn of popular fancy is—as fanciful things have, fortunately perhaps, so often a way of being—very far removed from the sailors’ inn of sober actuality.1925, C[icely] Fox Smith, “Sailos’ Inns”, in Ship Alley: More Sailor Town Days, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company…. From the entry nauticalness
  • For all beautiful things, no matter how fanciful, are somehow, somewhen, somewhence, true; and all true things, no matter how repellent, are somehow, somewhen, somewhence, beautiful.1910, “Volume 50”, in Good Housekeeping Magazine, Indiana University, published 2008, page 157. From the entry somewhence
  • Albrecht also provided for an antiquarium in the ducal Residenz, a room devoted to the display of Roman portrait busts (many bearing fanciful identifications) as a series of illustrious men.2015, Nancy Thomson de Grummond, Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. From the entry antiquarium
  • In Sirayan society, the Reverend Candidius observed that the Sirayans had a different definition of "sins", which he considered were merely "fanciful inventions" not forbidden by the Law of God.2008, Chiu Hsin-Hui, The Colonial 'civilizing Process' in Dutch Formosa: 1624 - 1662, →ISBN, page 135. From the entry Sirayan

Meaning of fanciful

  1. adjective Imaginative or fantastic; ignoring reality.
  2. adjective Unreal or imagined.

Full definition of fanciful

Questions about fanciful in a sentence

How do you use fanciful in a sentence?
Fanciful is used as an adjective. For example: “It was fanciful to suppose that all he had to do would be to stride into a top law firm and he would be hired on the spot.”
What is a short sentence with fanciful?
“Huang’s counter-narrative, however, is also a bit fanciful.”
What does fanciful mean?
Fanciful means imaginative or fantastic; ignoring reality.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fanciful (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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