FAIRY TALE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does fairy tale mean? 

• FAIRY TALE (noun)
  The noun FAIRY TALE has 2 senses:

1. a story about fairies; told to amuse children

2. an interesting but highly implausible story; often told as an excuse

  Familiarity information: FAIRY TALE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FAIRY TALE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A story about fairies; told to amuse children

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

fairy story; fairy tale; fairytale

Hypernyms ("fairy tale" is a kind of...):

narration; narrative; story; tale (a message that tells the particulars of an act or occurrence or course of events; presented in writing or drama or cinema or as a radio or television program)

Domain member category:

Bluebeard ((fairytale) a monstrous villain who marries seven women; he kills the first six for disobedience)

Sense 2

Meaning:

An interesting but highly implausible story; often told as an excuse

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

cock-and-bull story; fairy story; fairy tale; fairytale; song and dance

Hypernyms ("fairy tale" is a kind of...):

fib; story; tale; taradiddle; tarradiddle (a trivial lie)

 Context examples 

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)

It was only half a dozen little fairy tales, but Jo had worked over them patiently, putting her whole heart into her work, hoping to make something good enough to print.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale—a day-dream.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I sat looking at Peggotty for some time, in a reverie on this supposititious case: whether, if she were employed to lose me like the boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way home again by the buttons she would shed.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)

She didn't like dolls, fairy tales were childish, and one couldn't draw all the time.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as historical in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer wonder tales in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)

He spoke so kindly, and opened Hans Anderson's fairy tales so invitingly before me, that I was more ashamed than ever, and went at my lesson in a neck-or-nothing style that seemed to amuse him immensely.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant; whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth's surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)