fancy fair

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

fancy fair (plural fancy fairs)

1. (historical) A fair at which articles of fancy and ornament are sold, generally for some charitable purpose.
   • 1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter XXXVII, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 168:

     "A fancy fair is a new kind of charity, my lord; or, strictly speaking, a new mode of dispensing it, by employing the wits and fingers of our wives and daughters in making all sorts of fidfads, which turns your house into a Babel, sends your servants to Ackermann's, or the haberdasher's, ten times a day for coloured paper and pasteboard, fancy edgings and colour-boxes, ribbon and velvet, silver edging, beads and braid, card-racks and hand-screens, dolls' heads and purse-clasps—in short, things without end, as I know to my sorrow."

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “fancy fair”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)