Biography

How to spell biography

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce biography

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biography mean?

1. nounA written account of another person's life.

Biography in a sentence

• The journalist spent three years researching a biography of the former president.

• Her latest biography traces the inventor's childhood through to his final patents.

Where does biography come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: bios, meaning 'life', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to record'. The combined idea is literally a written account of a life. The compound form 'biographia' surfaced in late Greek and Latin, and English adopted 'biography' in the middle of the 1600s, around the time when written lives of notable figures became a popular literary form. The same bios root gives us 'biology' (the study of life) and 'biopsy', while the graphein root sits inside 'paragraph', 'autograph', and 'photograph'. Remembering that the middle of the word is the 'graph' of writing helps fix the silent-looking 'ph' spelling and the 'o' that links 'bio' to 'graphy'.

How the word is built

• bio- (life)
• -graph (writing/record)
• -y (noun suffix)