Nonfiction

How to spell nonfiction

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nonfiction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nonfiction mean?

1. nounProse writing that is based on real facts, people, and events rather than invented stories.

Nonfiction in a sentence

• The library shelves the biographies in the nonfiction section.

• She prefers nonfiction and reads mostly history and travel accounts.

Where does nonfiction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word joins the prefix non-, which simply means 'not', to fiction, a noun that English took from Old French ficcion and ultimately from the Latin fictio, meaning 'a shaping, a forming, or a making up'. That Latin noun came from the verb fingere, which literally meant 'to mould or fashion', as a potter shapes clay, and only later took on the sense of fashioning something untrue or imaginary. Fiction settled into English in the 1400s to mean invented narrative, and the negated compound nonfiction appeared much later, in the nineteenth century, as libraries and publishers needed a tidy label for prose grounded in fact. The spelling trap is purely about the join: it is written as one solid word with no hyphen and no space, so the doubled letter sequence in the middle (the 'n' of non meeting the 'f' of fiction) and the single, unbroken form are what writers most often second-guess.

How the word is built

• non- (not)
• fiction (invented narrative, from Latin fictio: a shaping or making)