Fantabulosa is now in the OED — the secret word for 'wonderful'
The OED added *fantabulosa*, Polari's word for 'wonderful', on 23 September 2026: where it came from, how it reached a 15-million radio audience and then lost its cover, and how to use it today.
The dictionary put the word in its own headline
Every quarter, Oxford Languages adds a batch of entries to the Oxford English Dictionary and picks a few to lead with. The update published on 23 September 2026 was announced under a single word: Fantabulosa! That word sits in the headline of the announcement itself, with a footnote translating it — "Excellent, wonderful, fantastic." 1
The same update added more than 400 words, phrases and senses, among them hot yoga, overnight oats, will-they-won't-they, auto-reply and mountweazel. 2 Fantabulosa is the one the dictionary chose to say first, and it has the strangest history in the batch.
The word in one glance
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Spelling | fantabulosa |
| Part of speech | Adjective 3 |
| Pronunciation | British fan-tab-yuh-LOH-suh, /ˌfantabjᵿˈləʊsə/; US /ˌfænˌtæbjəˈloʊsə/ 3 |
| Meaning | "Excellent, wonderful, fantastic" 3 |
| Register | Slang, chiefly British; the OED marks it colloquial and slang 3 |
| Language of origin | Polari, the cant historically used in Britain's gay subculture 34 |
| First recorded use | 1965, in a Round the Horne radio script 3 |
| Added to the dictionary | 23 September 2026 1 |
Where the word comes from
The OED's etymology line is short and specific. Fantabulosa is an alteration of fantabulous, made "in Polari slang", with the ending remodelled on the Italian feminine ending -osa. 3 The parent word is itself a modern invention, a blend of fantastic and fabulous that the OED now traces to 1946, in the Washington Daily News. 5
The two halves carry their own histories. Fantastic came into English from Greek phantastikos, "able to imagine", by way of Latin and Old French. Fabulous came from Latin fabulosus, "celebrated in fable", from fabula, a story. 6 A word built from a story and a fantasy, with an Italian ending bolted on, is how one community settled on a word for "wonderful".
The language that did the settling, Polari, is older than the word. Its name comes from the Italian parlare, "to talk", and the OED's entry for it reaches back to 1846. 7 Polari is a cant assembled from Mediterranean sailors' slang, thieves' cant, Romani and Shelta, and from the nineteenth century it was spoken in Britain by fairground and circus people, merchant seamen and actors — and by gay men, who used it to talk in public without being understood. 4
One caution for anyone who goes looking. Etymonline dates fantabulous to 1957, eleven years after the newspaper the OED cites. Both dates are in print; this piece follows the dictionary's own entry.
Sixty years from a radio studio to the dictionary
The OED's first citation for fantabulosa is a line whose second meaning went past most of its audience. It comes from the eleventh episode of the first series of Round the Horne, the BBC radio comedy that ran from March 1965 to June 1968:
Julian: There's a nice conversion on the A1 near Stevenage—stands right on the main road—that's nice ennit, Sand? Sandy: Oh fantabulosa! And it's detached as well. 3
Julian and Sandy were two camp chorus boys played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. Their sketches were built on Polari, the show's host Kenneth Horne played the straight man who failed to notice what they were talking about, and the greeting that opened them — "Ooh hello! I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!" — became a national line. 8 The pair first appeared in the fourth episode of the first series and then in every episode after, and the show built a regular audience of about 15 million, the last British radio programme to reach that many listeners. 89
Polari had existed to be illegible. A national radio comedy read it out loud, week after week, to the largest audience British radio had. Some of what Julian and Sandy said slipped past the BBC entirely: "I met him in a cottage" drew no complaint, while the gay audience heard a public lavatory. 8
The timing was awkward. Homosexual acts between men were illegal in the United Kingdom for the whole of the show's run; the law changed only with the Sexual Offences Act, which received royal assent on 27 July 1967 and applied to England and Wales. 10 Once the need for a code fell away, so did the code: the BBC's account has Polari going out of use as homosexuality was decriminalised in England, and by the 1970s gay liberation had come to read its camp as an old-fashioned stereotype. 411
The word outlived the working language. It became the title of Paul Baker's dictionary of the cant, Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang, in 2002, and four years later the BBC made a television play about Kenneth Williams under the name Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, with Michael Sheen in the title role. 412 In February 2017, trainee priests at a Cambridge theological college held an evening service in Polari; the prayer offered was "Fabeness be to the Auntie, and to the Homie Chavvie, and to the Fantabulosa Fairy", and the college's principal called the wording "hugely regrettable". 11
The softer revival arrived too. Paul Baker has written three books about the language, a literary prize for LGBTQ+ writers carries its name, and in February 2025 Olly Alexander released a solo album called Polari, citing "a backlog of thousands of years where we were unable to live openly" as its inspiration. 413 And the word is still in daily use somewhere. The OED's most recent citation is from August 2024, from a book tour account signing off on a visit to Glasgow: "4 very sleepy book bois about to head home to London. Bye bye Glasgow, you've been fantabulosa!" 3
What an entry actually claims
"Added to the dictionary" is easy to read as a verdict. The OED is built the other way round. It is a historical dictionary of more than 500,000 entries and 3.5 million quotations, documenting how English has been used rather than ruling on how it should be. Its stated bar for a new word is "independent examples from a good variety of sources, and evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of time". 1
Fantabulosa clears that bar with room to spare: sixty-one years separate its first citation from its entry. 3 It arrived in a batch that also carried the Welsh spirit bwbach, the Caribbean jablesse and the Trinbagonian douen — three names for supernatural creatures, gathered from three living English-speaking regions. 1 A quarterly update is a record of what a language has been doing, and last month it had been doing folklore and coffee.
Which word do you want?
Fantabulosa has close relatives, and they are not interchangeable.
| If you mean | Reach for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "Wonderful", with a knowing nod to British camp and queer history | fantabulosa | The word's charge comes from where it has been; used flatly it loses it 3 |
| "Good", in the plainest Polari | bona | The cant's everyday word for good, and the one the radio sketches used most 4 |
| An American exclamation of delight, with no Polari history attached | fantabulous | The 1946 blend the longer word was built from 5 |
| "Excellent", in ordinary speech | fabulous | In continuous use since the fifteenth century, and the least marked option 6 |
| The register itself, rather than quality | camp | It names a style of performance and taste; it is not a synonym for good 4 |
Fantabulosa is also not the first Polari word to leave the language behind. Naff, zhoosh, blag, khazi and cottaging all reached general British English, most of them so thoroughly that their origin is invisible. 4
How to use it
Fantabulosa is an adjective, chiefly British, and filed under slang. In an American business email, used as a straight swap for "wonderful", it will read as a typo or a joke. It works best said out loud, in a warm or theatrical register, by somebody who knows where it came from. Three examples, each doing a different job:
- Everyday British, affectionate: "The tea was lukewarm and it rained all afternoon, and the whole weekend was still fantabulosa."
- A nod to the history: "I'd only ever heard fantabulosa in Round the Horne repeats, so hearing it in a Manchester bar felt like meeting an old actor in the street."
- Online, in the voice the OED's newest citation uses: "Bye, Glasgow. You've been fantabulosa."
There is one further thing to weigh, and it belongs to the reader rather than to any dictionary. This is a word from a vocabulary that existed to keep its speakers unrecognised, in a country where using it meant using it while breaking the law. Said as a nod to that history, it reads as recognition. Said as decoration, it reads as costume.
Three questions settle it. Do you know what Polari was? Are you in a place where camp will land — spoken, warm, a little performed? Could you answer if someone asked where the word came from? Three yeses and it is yours to use. Fewer than three, and wonderful will do the work with less risk.
What the dictionary does to a code
In 1965 the word worked because it was not written anywhere. It has ended up in a book that any subscriber can read, filed in alphabetical order between a Victorian steam engine and the shorter word it was made from. 3 The trade is visible in that move. A code that gets printed is a code that stops being secret, and what it becomes instead is a record — kept, dated, and citable, down to the line about a conversion on the A1 that a fifteen-million audience heard as a property listing.
References
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4Polari — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 5
- 6fantabulous — Etymology, Origin & Meaning
etymonline.com
- 7
- 8Julian and Sandy — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 9Round the Horne — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 10Sexual Offences Act 1967 — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 11
- 12Kenneth Williams — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 13Polari (album) — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
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