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:
"My mother had regrets about my birth, and I was driven to the edge psychologically," she wrote in her autobiography, "A Personal History of Polka Dots".
From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026
"I made up my mind that if he could live with it, I could live without it," she wrote in her autobiography.
From BBC ● Aug. 26, 2026
She was also “at least temporarily,” in her words, “a full-fledged movie star,” she wrote in her autobiography “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 26, 2026
Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday at the age of 80, was “at least temporarily,” in her words, “a full-fledged movie star,” according to her autobiography “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 25, 2026
She did not exactly censor Charles’s autobiography, but she did clean it up as much as she could so that nothing would be misunderstood, and nothing, she hoped, would give offense.
From "Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith" by Deborah Heiligman
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
“The projections mirror and amplify that as part of the visual vocabulary, whether that’s Douglass’ newspaper articles or autobiographies, or the text of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 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
Considered by many to be one of the best military autobiographies in history, Grant’s life story was a bestseller.
From "Lincoln's Last Days: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever" by Bill O'Reilly
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.
