Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a man’s favourite girl or woman.

1812		Vaux Vocab. of the Flash Lang.
1839		W.A. Miles Poverty, Mendicity and Crime; Report 136: Their dress varies according to their luck – a thief can be told if he has been at work by the alteration of his dress; above all by that of the woman, their fancy women.
1841		‘The Mill! The Mill!’ Dublin Comic Songster 104: Where ev’ry kiddy whistles a tune, / And spouts away in his blue shaloon, / And tells of the joys he once espied, / With his fancy woman by his side.
1847		Sydney Morn. Herald 5 Jan. 2/7: [H]e had given information to Dr. Hill of a prisoner’s having written a letter to an alleged ‘fancy woman’ of the latter’s.
1853		Bell’s Life in Sydney 31 Dec. 3/2: She termed her a — old fishmonger’s woman, and afterwards said she was the fancy woman of the portly personage who parades the markets .

2. a prostitute.

1835		‘The Spring Bedstead’ in Knowing Chaunter 17: I lately came to town, / In very decent trimming, / And thought to do it brown, / Among the fancy women.
1908		D.G. Phillips Susan Lenox I 373: The mothers [...] knew what the ‘fancy lady’s’ life really meant. [Ibid.] 383: Dan [...] had attracted the attention of what Cassatt called ‘a fancy lady’ who lived two floors below them.
1951		R. Starnes Grant’s Tomb 196: The girl spent the night sleeping comfortably in a cell at the Women’s Detention Bureau, surrounded by [...] fancy ladies.
1973		R. Todasco Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Dirty Words.
2001		(con. late 19C) C. Jeffords Shady Ladies of the Old West 🌐 Other names [for prostitutes] were [...] ‘fancy women’, [etc.].

3. (also fancy affair, fancy lady, fancy trim) a mistress, a ‘bit on the side’.

1845		Bell’s Life in Sydney 22 Nov. 3/2: She also stated that Mrs. Byers had said, that she, Mrs. Bolton, was Captain Innis’s ‘fancy woman’ — that, she, the prisoner, didn’t care for him or his wooden leg, and that all he, Captain Innes, was good for, was to go to bed to married women .
1850		Life in Boston & N.Y. (Boston, MA) 10 Aug. n.p.: We don’t like to see a beardless brat [...] sport a fancy woman and owe $200 for board and clothes.
1861		N.E. Police Gaz. (Boston, MA) 5 Oct. 8/2: Noyes, alias ‘Pop Corn,’ has for a famcy woman Ada Fuller who tends door at 100 Charleston street.
1892		Daily News 1 Mar. 2/4: He brought home a female, whom he introduced as his ‘fancy woman’.
1907		J.W. Carr ‘Word-List from Hampstead, N.H.’ in DN III iii 187: fancy woman, n. A kept woman.
1930		W.R. Burnett Iron Man 298: She was Lewis’s fancy woman.
1939		H.E. Bates My Uncle Silas 66: He was reputed [...] to have a fancy lady in Nice. [Ibid.] 68: I haven’t got a fancy affair in Nice! [...] She lives in Monte Carlo!
1943		‘Myles na gCopaleen’ Faustus Kelly in ‘Flann O’Brien’ Stories & Plays (1973) 141: Is he going to be wheeled in on to the ratepayers’ backs just because he’s related to the Chairman’s fancy woman?
1953		W. Brown Run, Chico, Run (1959) 6: You couldn’t go into the room because the old man had his fancy trim in there. You knew because you could smell her perfume through the crack of the door.
1958		A. Sillitoe Sat. Night and Sun. Morning 34: The dirty bogger! He’s got a fancy-woman!
1971		L. Sanders Pleasures of Helen 130: ‘Fred wanted to sleep in the raw, but I wouldn’t let him. ‘I’m not one of your fancy women, Fred,’.
1982		P. Barker Union Street 192: Her Dad had a fancy woman a lot older than himself.
1996		J. Cameron It Was An Accident 219: She think you got a fancy woman?
2005		Guardian 5 Nov. 🌐 A public figure [...] running on a platform of the end of her marriage, her own canonisation and the humiliation of her husband and his fancy woman.
2007		R. Milward Apples (2023) 36: [O]ur dad [...] had his own fancy-lady.