fiction. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

fiction

SYLLABICATION:	fic·tion
PRONUNCIATION:	fkshn
NOUN:	1a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented. b. The act of inventing such a creation or pretense. 2. A lie. 3a. A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact. b. The category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels and short stories. 4. Law Something untrue that is intentionally represented as true by the narrator.
ETYMOLOGY:	Middle English ficcioun, from Old French fiction, from Latin ficti, fictin-, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to form. See dheigh- in Appendix I.
OTHER FORMS:	fiction·al —ADJECTIVE fiction·ali·ty (-sh-nl-t) —NOUN fiction·al·ly —ADVERB
WORD HISTORY:	To most people “the latest fiction” means the latest novels or stories rather than the most recently invented pretense or latest lie. All three senses of the word fiction point back to its source, Latin ficti, “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Ficti in turn was derived from fingere, “to make by shaping, feign, make up or invent a story or excuse.” Our first instance of fiction, recorded in a work composed around 1412, was used in the sense “invention of the mind, that which is imaginatively invented.” It is not a far step from this meaning to the sense “imaginative literature,” first recorded in 1599.


The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.