Biographical

How to spell biographical

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce biographical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biographical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to or describing the events and details of a person's life.

Biographical in a sentence

• The museum displayed a biographical note beside each portrait.

• Her new book offers a biographical account of the composer's early years.

Where does biographical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek roots: bios, meaning 'life', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to draw'. The combined idea of 'life-writing' produced the noun 'biography', which entered English in the seventeenth century to describe an account of a person's life, partly through earlier Greek and Latin models. The adjective 'biographical' followed shortly after, formed by adding the Latin-derived suffix -ical, which turns a noun into a describing word meaning 'relating to'. The same bio- root appears in 'biology', 'biopsy' and 'antibiotic', while the graph element survives in 'photograph', 'paragraph' and 'autograph'. Remembering that the word is literally bio plus graph plus ical helps explain its spelling, since each chunk keeps its own clear shape rather than blending together.

How the word is built

• bio- (Greek: life)
• graph (Greek: write)
• -ical (adjective suffix)