Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The quality of being fanciful, or influenced by the fancy rather than by reason and experience; the quality of being dictated or produced by fancy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The quality of being fanciful

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

fanciful +‎ -ness

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Examples

  • No one would deny that resemblances are there; it is to distinguish them and estimate their significance without yielding to fancifulness, which is the well-nigh hopeless task.

    Albert Durer T. Sturge Moore 1907

  • Good-humoured, often merry, abounding in kindness and generosity, he passed for a man as happy as he was prosperous; yet those who talked intimately with him obtained now and then a glimpse of something not quite in harmony with these characteristics, a touch of what would be called fancifulness, of uncertain spirits.

    The Crown of Life George Gissing 1880

  • I think we give in comedy a kind of fancifulness and purity.

    Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography 1913

  • “Well, we of the gentler sex must be permitted a little fancifulness, must we not, my sweet?”

    Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror: Three Hearts and Three Lions - Poul Anderson Blue Tyson 2008

  • If those two guys were little homages to fancifulness, then the Creation Museum is a cathedral to it.

    Breakfast Links: Peter Pan, Facebook & Creationism : #comments 2007

  • Then the annoying Arthurians : “Well, we of the gentler sex must be permitted a little fancifulness, must we not, my sweet?”

    Archive 2008-09-01 Blue Tyson 2008

  • His illustrations now incorporated humor, history and fantasy, with a subsidiary line — since meeting the painter Richard Dadd — in sprites and fairies, that gave him licence to express his Celtic fancifulness and aversion to modernity without adopting the grave religiosity of the Pre-Raphaelites.

    'The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: 2007

  • And so, presently, being determined to give way to no fancifulness, I avoided the boundary of cliffs, and kept more to that part which commanded the slope, up and down which we made our journeys to and from the island below.

    The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' 2007

  • There is no difficulty, by the help of Aristotle and later writers, in criticizing the Timaeus of Plato, in pointing out the inconsistencies of the work, in dwelling on the ignorance of anatomy displayed by the author, in showing the fancifulness or unmeaningness of some of his reasons.

    Timaeus 2006

  • There is a certain Puritan narrowness that twitches whenever religion and fancifulness or fun! come together.

    To wear - or not to wear.... Terry Nelson 2006

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