Definition of "fairy story" [fairy story]

• A story about fairies; told to amuse children (noun)
• An interesting but highly implausible story; often told as an excuse (noun)

WordNet. Princeton University. 2010.

• "He has chosen the subject himself – a pretty fairy story – and told me how he wishes it treated; and I am accordingly working at it under his directions, which I think is, at any rate, showing an amiable desire to please, in faculties grown stiff with nearly seventy years 'wear and tear – used, disused, and misused."
• "He seemed a creature of the wild, more a night-roaming figure from some old fairy story or folk tale than a twentieth-century youth."
• "It will be remembered that it was this Cecil Winwood who concocted the fairy story that I had changed the plant of the nonexistent dynamite and who was responsible for the five years I had then spent in solitary."