fiction
Pluralfictions (some meanings)
- 1A type of literature built from invented or imaginative writing rather than real facts, usually in prose form.
He writes fiction in the evenings and reports the news by day.
The library keeps its fiction on shelves separate from history and biography.
Oppositenonfiction
Note
The literary sense keeps the oldest idea in the word. Latin fictiō meant 'a making, fashioning', from fingō, 'to form, mold, shape', so fiction is something shaped rather than found. As a genre it is usually uncountable: a great reader of fiction, the fiction section of the library. It can include verse, but the word most often points to prose, meaning novels and stories rather than poems.
- 2An account, spoken or written, that is not based on real events and is often meant to mislead.
Her alibi was a careful fiction designed to protect her brother.
The company's glowing financial statements were largely fiction.
Similarfabrication, invention, falsehood, lie, fantasy
Note
Here the word shows the other face of fingō, which also meant 'to feign'. Old French ficcion already meant 'ruse'. The native Old English word it displaced, lēasspell, was literally a 'false story'. This sense pairs naturally with fact, as in separate the fact from the fiction, and takes sharp intensifiers such as pure fiction and blatant fictions. A fiction is one particular falsehood, while fiction without the article is falsehood in general.
- 3An assumption that a court accepts as true, regardless of whether it actually is, in order to apply a legal rule.
Through a long-standing fiction, the court regarded the corporation as a single legal person.
The doctrine rests on a fiction that the adopted child was born to the family.
Note
Lawyers inherited this sense almost unchanged, since Latin fictiō could already name a rhetorical or legal fiction. Outside a courtroom the full phrase legal fiction is safer, because fiction alone would be heard as a misleading account. A legal fiction is not meant to mislead. The court adopts the assumption openly so that a rule can apply.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English ficcioun, from Old French ficcion ("dissimulation, ruse, invention"), from Latin fictiō ("a making, fashioning, a feigning"), from fingō ("to form, mold, shape, devise, feign"). It displaced the native Old English lēasspell, literally "false story."