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:
“I was never looking to her thinking that this was autobiography or anything,” she says.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 12, 2026
In his 2012 autobiography "An American Son," the man oft-memed as the "viceroy" of Cuba, recounts boasting to his exiled Cuban grandfather that he would one day overthrow Fidel Castro and free Cuba.
From Barron's ● Jul. 29, 2026
Instead, her autobiography hides the real Spark in a tangle of commonplaces.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 17, 2026
Famous Boston fund manager Jeremy Grantham recalled in his autobiography one of his first forays into stock picking as a young man.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 15, 2026
This autobiography, moreover, is a book about language.
From "Hunger of Memory" by Richard Rodriguez
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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
Scotusblog, a website devoted to covering the Supreme Court, in 2012 posted a list of 353 books written or edited by justices since 1776, from autobiographies and poetry to legal theory and ruminations on war.
From New York Times ● Jul. 27, 2023
Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators.
From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead
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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.