Fiction

How to spell fiction

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fiction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fiction mean?

1. nounLiterature or stories describing imaginary events and people rather than real ones.
2. nounA statement or belief that is invented and not true.

Fiction in a sentence

• The library shelves the crime novels under fiction.

• The alibi turned out to be a complete fiction.

• She writes literary fiction in the evenings and edits reports by day.

• His account of the meeting was pure fiction.

Where does fiction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Fiction comes from the Latin fictio, meaning 'a fashioning' or 'a feigning', which was built on the verb fingere, literally 'to shape, mould, or form', the same kind of action a potter performs with wet clay. From the idea of moulding something by hand, the sense widened to cover anything formed in the mind, and so to a story that has been made up rather than reported as fact. English took the word in the late 1300s through Old French ficcion, at first meaning an invention or a fabrication. The literary sense, novels and short stories as a category, is comparatively recent, settling in over the 1700s. The same fingere root surfaces in relatives such as 'figment', 'feign', and 'effigy', and it explains the otherwise odd 'ct' spelling, which preserves the Latin stem.

How the word is built

• fict- (from fingere: to shape, mould, invent)
• -ion (noun suffix: act or result of)