> The leap from a word meaning "imaginary" to a word meaning "fantastic" struck me as odd initially, but apparently it comes from the sense of the word "imaginary" as "unreal".
What other sense is there that Wiktionary doesn’t know about?
My primary association with the word "fantastic" is simply "great" or "very good", as in "you did a fantastic job!". It's this meaning of the word that I found oddly disconnected from the word "imaginary". How do you get from something meaning "not real" to something meaning "very good"?
But the word "unreal" helped me make the leap, since that's a word I would use to describe something I thought was "very cool" or "well done".
"Fantastic" also means "based on fantasy", so the leap to "imaginary" is short.
Like "fantastic voyage", "fantastic beliefs", "fantastic visions".
The link between "fantastic" and "phenotype" was surprising to me, even though it makes sense reading it.