autobiography
Americannoun
-
autobiographies
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of autobiography
Explanation
You are writing an autobiography when you write your own life story. A writer who writes an autobiography is like a painter who paints a self-portrait. If you intend to write your autobiography one day, it might be a good idea to start recording notes about your life in a diary. The author Gertrude Stein was being clever when she poked fun at the very idea of autobiography when she wrote her own memoirs but titled them The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, instead of The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein.
Vocabulary lists containing autobiography
Words to Live By: Bio
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Write On!: Graph and Gram
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To Thine Own Self Be True: Auto
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
To gain more agency, for example, you can tend the garden for an hour or write your autobiography.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 18, 2026
Elsewhere, Mr. Tommasini quotes the same remark from Anderson’s autobiography in two different chapters, a lapse better editing should have caught.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026
Sir Paul has invited BBC News to spend an afternoon with him at his London HQ to talk about his new autobiography Threads: My Life in Style.
From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2026
Elsewhere in his rediscovered autobiography, Byfield described how injuries from the war continued to affect him decades after the fighting ended:
From Science Daily ● Sep. 7, 2026
He did learn to write, and recounted his life story in an autobiography.
From "Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science" by Marc Aronson
What if autobiographies or books about history are more your thing?
From BBC ● Jul. 31, 2026
So I love to look for vegan books, nutrition books, rock biographies and autobiographies.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 2026
The book’s leading actors have been subjects of biographies and autobiographies, and most events have been exhaustively covered in scholarly and popular histories and articles as well as media reports.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 16, 2025
Chapter 9 is about Frederick Douglass and identity-aware liberalism, as expressed through his autobiographies.
From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024
In their autobiographies, they recounted great races in intimate detail, but falls and injuries were glossed over with the most perfunctory language.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
