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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
fairy-tale

"oral narrative centered on magical tests, quests, and transformations," 1749, translating French Conte de feés, the name given to her collection by Madame d'Aulnois (1698, translated into English 1699). As an adjective (also fairytale), attested by 1963.

Wiktionary
fairy-tale

a. Of the nature of a fairy tale; as if from a fairy tale.

Usage examples of "fairy-tale".

But the adventure should hold something beyond the fairy-tale elements of a magic golden bauble, a vengeful queen, a mysterious castle, and rivals for the hand of a princess.

The man was in fact Egle, the well-known collector of songs, legends and fairy-tales, who was on a walking tour.

On the eve of that day and seven years after Egle, the collector of folk songs, had told the little girl on the beach a fairy-tale about a ship with crimson sails, Assol returned home from her weekly visit to the toy shop feeling distressed and looking sad.

This pretty sbirress had not the wit of her profession, for the story I had told her sounded like a fairy-tale.

Chadwick, seeing Hatty about to pick up her child, which was beautiful enough to have come out of a fairy-tale, snatched it back.

The floating lilies, the spears of cattails and iris greens that had always seemed so charming to her were ominous now, fairy-tale foreign and frightening.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, wheezing with nervousness as he watched Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, wished that he might dive down into those fairy-tale tunnels supposedly running under the churches, for what use were those rabbit holes now that the Secesh traitors would be shown what to do with their slavery laws with bayonet and Enfield?

When they came to her on winter evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent, concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island.

Greenberg, and John Heifers, an anthology of fairy-tales retold as science fiction, has some clever stuff in it.

His homily led off with such fulsome praise of Monsieur, that, from that day forward, he lost all his credit, and sensible people thereafter only looked upon him as a vile sycophant, a mere dealer in flattery and fairy-tales.

The island of Anguilla was breathtakingly beautiful, and the hotel was a fairy-tale Moorish palace, with domes and turrets and fabulous gardens, but she was completely alone.

God-sculpted muscle and long, granite cock, Jarred leaned over her, his feral stare reminding her of that fairy-tale wolf about to sit down to Red Riding Hood tartare.

The floating lilies, the spears of cattails and iris greens that had always seemed so charming to her were ominous now, fairy-tale foreign and frightening.

Sitting somewhere in a dark corner of the garden or lying in bed, he conjured up before him the images of the fairy-tale princesses--they appeared with the face of Luba and of other young ladies of his acquaintance, noiselessly floating before him in the twilight and staring into his eyes with enigmatic looks.

Agido tilted her head back to watch their dizzying descent as she had done as a child in Iphigeneia, unimaginably far to the east, so far away that her homeland was little more than a fairy-tale to the people of Norvena Parva, and the color of her hair and eyes marked her as a foreigner, almost a monster.