Autobiography

How to spell autobiography

13 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce autobiography

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does autobiography mean?

1. nounAn account of a person's life written by that same person.

Autobiography in a sentence

• The retired general spent two years writing his autobiography.

• Her autobiography described a childhood spent moving between cities.

Where does autobiography come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built entirely from Greek pieces: autos meaning 'self', bios meaning 'life', and graphein meaning 'to write'. Put together it literally describes the writing of one's own life. Unlike many classical compounds, it is a fairly modern coinage, appearing in English only around the very end of the 1700s; the poet and writer Robert Southey is often credited with popularising it in print in 1809. It was assembled by analogy with the older word 'biography', which had reached English through Latin and Greek to mean an account of someone's life written by another person. The 'auto-' simply marks the difference: the subject and the author are the same person. The same trio of roots turns up across English in 'automatic', 'biology', and 'photograph', so recognising auto + bio + graph helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• auto- (self)
• bio (life)
• graph (write)
• -y (noun suffix)