whimsical.

Playfully unusual or imaginative rather than strictly serious or practical.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• a whimsical illustration
• whimsical humor

On the page

The whimsical map marked the library as a dangerous sea of unfinished stories.

Usage notes

Primary category: literary / elevated general. Forms: Comparative more whimsical; superlative most whimsical when comparison is meaningful. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings. Established modern English lexical item. No separate regional spelling or grammatical inflection entry. Writing functions: description, character. Commonness: moderately common.