What's the difference between fanciful and whimsy?

Fanciful


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of fancy; guided by fancy, rather than by reason and experience; whimsical; as, a fanciful man forms visionary projects.
  • (a.) Conceived in the fancy; not consistent with facts or reason; abounding in ideal qualities or figures; as, a fanciful scheme; a fanciful theory.
  • (a.) Curiously shaped or constructed; as, she wore a fanciful headdress.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Quite a lot of the downtown action in The Catcher in the Rye (a night out in a fancy hotel; a date with an old girlfriend; an encounter with a prostitute, and a mugging by her pimp) might almost as well describe a young soldier’s nightmare experience of R&R.
  • (2) The plot departs from the good book in big ways, small ways, in fact any way the makers (evangelical husband and wife Mark Burnett and Roma Downey) fancy.
  • (3) The Normandie Design is plum in the middle of the amiable chaos of South American city life, in Santa Efigênia, where the streets are thronged with tiny electronics stores – great if you fancy a fake Chinese iPhone.
  • (4) Small business gets clobbered by taxes and business rates, while big business turns around and says to the state: "This is how much tax I fancy paying this year, take it or leave it".
  • (5) So really, it could be anyone.” US intelligence believes the Democratic party’s servers were hacked by a group known alternatively as Fancy Bear, APT 29 or Sofacy, which they say was working for the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence .
  • (6) Glitzy online lectures, or fancy learning technologies, are difficult to reconcile with this fundamental scepticism.
  • (7) BSkyB believes the modelling is flawed and that conclusions such as that it could benefit by up to £600m over five years is "fanciful".
  • (8) The first fanciful bit of the Biden 4 Prez story came out this past weekend, when the veep sat down with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for a two-hour meeting .
  • (9) Treatments were 0, 2, 4, or 6% (DM basis) bleachable fancy tallow (BT) fed with 0 or 7.5% (DM basis) forage.
  • (10) The court heard how all of these areas and more are gambled on in the unregulated Asian markets, in so-called "fancy bets".
  • (11) I require my coffee to taste like coffee, not like fancy warm milk.
  • (12) "They sit in their fancy hotels, in safety, talking and talking.
  • (13) Protest is what you do when those you elect are not listening, and it can, on occasion, be powerful to dress up in fancy dress and sing.
  • (14) It's actually very taboo to stop and say, "OK, I'm in a band and I'm really successful and my boyfriend's a pop star and he's really handsome and lots of girls fancy him, but I don't want to be with him."
  • (15) Founder and executive deputy chairman Mike Ashley didn't need a salary or a fancy bonus plan because he would gain from the improvement in the company's value.
  • (16) Good luck telling your manager you fancy a day off.
  • (17) I'm not even asking for a handout or asking to be able to keep up a fancy lifestyle and have someone else pay for the boring stuff, I work hard, I save and I pay my taxes and my standard of living gets worse and worse every year.
  • (18) "My use of the word 'fancy' was not meant as a proper insult.
  • (19) The Mr Benn approach also opens up lots of fancy dress options for TV sponsorship bumpers and blipverts.
  • (20) Does he fancy winning the league again & knock Liverpool right off their perch?"

Whimsy


Definition:

  • (n.) A whim; a freak; a capricious notion, a fanciful or odd conceit.
  • (n.) A whim.
  • (n.) A whimsey.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Josie Long Watching Josie Long evolve from purveyor of childlike whimsy to political agitator has been one of the pleasures of the last few festivals.
  • (2) Irrespective of which will win, four of them can be categorised, as austere arthouse ( Amour ), the higher whimsy ( Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Life of Pi ), and customary US family angst ( Silver Linings Playbook ).
  • (3) Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Reporter, on the other hand, calls it "a fugacious bit of whimsy that can only be judged minor Woody Allen".
  • (4) Having to work with real life events keeps him from the shark-jumping flights of whimsy he employs elsewhere in his oeuvre.
  • (5) Each floor has been shaped by a different team of designers - Cibic and Partners, Stanton Williams, Eldridge Smerin and Future Systems - adding a touch of near-gravity here, whimsy there and pure theatre elsewhere.
  • (6) "It's very important to hold on to our whimsy," he says when I ask him about it.
  • (7) However, Keating's highly contrived plots and acute sense of whimsy failed to find favour in the US.
  • (8) Whenever his writing threatens to descend into the period's standard responses of disdain or whimsy, his ear catches the unique accent of an ordinary voice and elevates it to the dignity of print.
  • (9) But the narrative skips along, lightened by jokes and whimsies.
  • (10) Under the new name Mumford & Sons (a bit of nu-folk whimsy: no blood relations here), their earliest gigs, remembers Lovett, "were awful.
  • (11) Alice has all the makings of a long-term classic: a bold, funny and mercifully whimsy-free take on Lewis Carroll, accompanied by the fizzing musical panache of Joby Talbot’s score.
  • (12) At the same time, he largely dispensed with his breathless, gossamer sentences, which often teetered on the brink of preciousness and whimsy, and ushered in a style that was much leaner and more sinewy: "Dick!
  • (13) Her father was a country doctor who had seen his share of death and who liked to say there were only three subjects for art: sex, death and whimsy.
  • (14) The Edwardian classic by Lucy Maud Montgomery about a feisty, freckled orphan girl sent to live on the island unsurprisingly features heavily in PEI's tourist industry promotions, such that some shops resort to having Anne-free zones to lure visitors wearied of the whimsy.
  • (15) Amelie The Berkeley Repertory Theatre trades northern California cool for Montmartre whimsy when it offers this musical, adapted from the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film.
  • (16) When in the mid- 1930s he went to Mousehole, the Cornish fishing village, to pursue primitive realism, it was because "I could see in it Rousseau, Modigliani, Bonnard and Matisse – these painters had more meaning for me than the whimsy of Paul Klee" (Dylan Thomas liked Klee).
  • (17) For all the lovers of his whimsy, there are equally ardent critics.
  • (18) (Second place in that poll are the Dresden Dolls, but I guess MLB wasn't big on pretentious open letters and forced whimsy.)
  • (19) I caught my breath and took a seat, giving up on any whimsy about first class.
  • (20) Industry insiders I talked to thought the next generation of comics would bring in a new era of whimsy and mild observation.