- fantastic
- fantastic 1 chimerical, visionary, fanciful, imaginary, quixoticAnalogous words: extravagant, extreme (see EXCESSIVE): incredible, unbelievable, implausible (see affirmative adjectives at PLAUSIBLE): preposterous, absurd (see FOOLISH): irrational, unreasonable: delusory, delusive, deceptive, Misleading2 Fantastic, bizarre, grotesque, antic are comparable when they describe works of art, effects produced by nature or art, ideas, or behavior and mean conceived or made, or seemingly conceived or made, without reference to reality, truth, or common sense.Fantastic stresses the exercise of unrestrained imagination or unlicensed fancy. It therefore variously connotes absurd extravagance in conception, remoteness from reality, or merely ingenuity in devising{
fantastic figures, with bulbous heads, the circumference of a bushel, grinned enormously in his face— Hawthorne
}{one need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there— Gray
}{he wove fantastic stories of the hunting bridle— Kipling
}Bizarre is applied to what is unduly, often sensationally, strange or queer; it suggests the use of violent contrasts (as in color, in sound, or in emotional effects) or of strikingly incongruous combinations (as of the tragic and the comic or of the horrible and the tender){it was bizarre in the extreme. It was as if a judge, wearing the black cap, had suddenly put out his tongue at the condemned— Powys
}{temple sculpture be-came bizarre—rearing monsters, fiery horses, great pillared halls teeming with sculptures— Atlantic
}Grotesque emphasizes distortion of the natural to the point either of comic absurdity or of aesthetically effective ugliness. Technically the word is applied to a type of painting or sculpture of ancient Roman origin which serves a decorative rather than a pictorial purpose and which employs natural details (as animals, men, flowers, and foliage) and conventional designs and figures (as scrolls, garlands, and satyrs) in unnatural combinations or to the comic exaggerations or distortions of human and animal figures in the sculptured decorations and especially the gargoyles of Gothic architecture. It is from the latter association that the adjective in general use derives its leading implications of ridiculous ugliness or ludicrous caricature{the camel was crouching . . . with his grotesque head waving about in dumb protest to the blows— Hoffman
}{she differed from other comedians. There was nothing about her of the grotesque; none of her comic appeal was due to exaggeration— T. S. Eliot
}Sometimes the word suggests an absurdly irrational combination of incompatibles{the attempts ... to dress up the Labour movement as a return to the Palestinian Gospel, are little short of grotesqueinge
}Antic, chiefly in literary use, though once indistinguishable from grotesque, has come to stress ludicrousness or buffoonery more than unnaturalness or irrationality{he came running to me ... making a many antic gesture— Defoe
}{an outrageously funny novel . . . basically the product of an antic imagination— Gibbs
}{irrepressibly antic and unabashedly outspoken, he affects a brassy impudence that many of his staid associates appear to find refreshing— Kahn
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
