fiction
/ˈfɪkʃ(ə)n
/- He began his writing career with genre fiction, from historical novels to vampire horror sagas.
- In France Zola was the dominant practitioner of naturalism in prose fiction and the chief exponent of its doctrines.
Synonyms
- Their press release, penned by Pyro, is a more entertaining fiction than plenty of novels published this year.
- Sometimes misinformation, exaggerated fictions and relics of wartime propaganda are reported in the media.
- But the motorcycle story was such an outrageous fiction that I thought the readers of e-Poshta should know.
Synonyms
- He thinks he can rebuild the polite fictions of September 10.
- That is his function - to take the polite fictions and drag them back to the real world.
- So all of the conventions created in the wake of the Second World War - the Geneva Conventions, the very concept of war crimes - these are all just polite fictions to be crumpled?
Derivatives
fictionist
/ noun ...- Trevor is the best short fictionist in England, and I would make a similar claim for John Updike in this country.
- Playwrights since Pirandello, fictionists since Proust, have been pondering this question, lightly or ponderously.
- He was the editor who discovered or championed many of the world's most important fictionists and poets of the second half of the 20th century.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'invented statement'): via Old French from Latin fictio(n-), from fingere 'form, contrive'. Compare with feign and figment.
faint from Middle English:
The word faint is related to feign, both coming from French faindre and initially used in the original French sense of ‘feigned, simulated’, from Latin fingere ‘to form, contrive’ also the source of fiction (Late Middle English) and figment (Late Middle English). Another early meaning was ‘cowardly’, a sense now preserved only in the proverb faint heart never won fair lady. The sense ‘hardly perceptible’ dates from the mid 17th century. Feint (late 17th century) originally used in fencing for a deceptive blow is from the same source, while the mid 19th-century use of feint for lightly lined paper is simply a respelling of faint.