Novella

How to spell novella

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce novella

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does novella mean?

1. nounA short prose work of fiction, longer than a short story but shorter than a full-length novel.

Novella in a sentence

• She finished writing a novella of about a hundred pages over the summer.

• The book club chose a slim novella for members who were short on time.

Where does novella come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word comes straight from Italian, where novella meant 'a new thing' or 'a short tale', a feminine noun built on the Latin adjective novellus, meaning 'new' or 'young', itself a diminutive of novus, 'new'. In medieval Italy the plural novelle described the brief prose stories collected in works such as Boccaccio's Decameron, so the sense of a compact, self-contained narrative was attached early. English absorbed the word in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to name a work of fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a full novel. The shared Latin root novus also gives us 'novel', 'novelty', and 'innovate', all carrying the idea of newness. The doubled 'l' and the final 'a' are pure Italian and are exactly where writers slip, sometimes dropping a letter or anglicising the ending.

How the word is built

• novell- (from Italian novella: a new little thing, a tale)
• -a (Italian feminine noun ending)