708: fantasy, fancy, and phantom Nov 15, 2016

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It might be hard to imagine all of the words that have been created, arguably from people's imaginations, over the years. Quite appropriately, the Greek word for ‘imagination’ has given Modern English a plethora of words. The latinized form of that word, 'phantasia', comes from, ‘phantom,’ and earlier, 'phantazein' meaning ‘make visible’. You could probably guess that we get 'phantom' from this, but also 'fantasy' including all of its derivatives like 'fantastic' and 'fantastical', all originally spelt with a PH. Through a simple contraction of 'fantasy', we got the word 'fancy'.

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