Biographies

How to spell biographies

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce biographies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biographies mean?

1. nounWritten accounts of other people's lives, told by someone other than the subject.

Biographies in a sentence

• The library keeps its political biographies on the upper floor.

• She writes biographies of forgotten scientists for a small press.

Where does biographies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word brings together two Greek roots: bios, meaning 'life', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to record'. The compound idea of 'life-writing' was assembled in the early seventeenth century, and the singular 'biography' is recorded in English from the 1660s, with the related 'biographer' appearing around the same time. English took the form largely through Latin and the scholarly fashion for coining learned Greek compounds, the same impulse that gave us 'geography' (earth-writing) and 'photography' (light-writing). The plural simply follows the ordinary English rule of changing a final consonant-plus-y to -ies, which is the small spelling step that turns 'biography' into 'biographies'. Knowing that the middle is the familiar 'graph' element, the same one in 'graphic' and 'paragraph', helps fix the spelling, since the trickiness lies almost entirely in the unstressed vowels around it.

How the word is built

• bio- (life)
• -graph- (write, record)
• -y (noun-forming suffix)
• -ies (plural of -y)