tickle someone's fancy
tickle someone's fancy verb: to amuse, entertain, or appeal to someone; to stimulate someone's imagination in a favorable manner.
Verb
tickle someone's fancy (third-person singular simple present tickles someone's fancy, present participle tickling someone's fancy, simple past and past participle tickled someone's fancy)
- To amuse, entertain, or appeal to someone; to stimulate someone's imagination in a favorable manner.
- But the notion of Ralph Nickleby having directed it to be done, tickled his fancy so much, that he could not refrain from cracking all his ten fingers in succession.1839, Charles Dickens, chapter 11, in Nicholas Nickleby
- Mr. Adams, who loves a joke, and is not a lunatic, notwithstanding his opening words, tickled their fancy for an hour with quotations from Shakespeare and the editorial columns of The Brooklyn Eagle.1895 October 1, “‘The People’ Name Judge Gaynor”, in New York Times, retrieved 29 Jul 2009, page 2
Forms of tickle someone's fancy
| third-person singular present | tickles someone's fancy |
|---|---|
| present participle | tickling someone's fancy |
| past participle | tickled someone's fancy |
| past | tickled someone's fancy |
Questions about tickle someone's fancy
- What does tickle someone's fancy mean?
- Tickle someone's fancy means to amuse, entertain, or appeal to someone; to stimulate someone's imagination in a favorable manner.
- What part of speech is tickle someone's fancy?
- Tickle someone's fancy is a verb.
- What is the past tense of tickle someone's fancy?
- The past tense of tickle someone's fancy is tickled someone's fancy.
Words near tickle someone's fancy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tickle someone's fancy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-tickle someone's fancy.ogg.
Cite this entry: “tickle someone's fancy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tickle_someone%27s_fancy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.