Fantasises

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Creates mental images or scenarios that are not real, often involving wishful thinking or desires
2. Engages in imagining unlikely situations or events for pleasure or escape
3. Visualizes or thinks about ideas or experiences that exist only in the mind rather than in reality

Etymology: The verb "fantasise" is built from the noun "fantasy" plus the verb-forming suffix "-ise", and the noun itself has a long Greek past. Its ancestor, "phantasía", came from the Greek verb "phantazein", "to make visible", which was in turn tied to "phainein", "to show or bring to light". So at root, an image in the mind was something made to appear, a kind of inner display. The noun passed through Latin "phantasia" and Old French "fantasie" before reaching Middle English as "fantasie", and the same word then went through a series of meanings: a mental image, a whim or caprice, and eventually an imagined or unreal invention. The verb came much later, formed in English by attaching "-ise" to the noun, which itself was borrowed from Late Latin "-izare" through Old French. Some ways of picturing the mind are older than English, then: the word was already describing images that appear to the eye before it described daydreams.

Synonyms: imagines, dreams, envisions, conceives, visualizes