narrator

American  

[nar-ey-ter, na-rey‑, nar-uh‑] / ˈnær eɪ tər, næˈreɪ‑, ˈnær ə‑ /

Or narrater

noun

• narrators
  plural

1. a person who gives an account or tells the story of events, experiences, etc.

2. a person who adds spoken commentary to a film, television program, slide show, etc.

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narrator British  

/ nəˈreɪtə /

noun

1. a person who tells a story or gives an account of something

2. a person who speaks in accompaniment of a film, television programme, etc

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narrator Cultural  

1. A person who tells a story; in literature, the voice that an author takes on to tell a story. This voice can have a personality quite different from the author's. For example, in his story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe makes his narrator a raving lunatic.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• narrators
  plural

Etymology

Origin of narrator

First recorded in 1610–20; from Latin narrātor “narrator, historian” see narrate ( def. ), -or ² ( def. )

Explanation

A narrator is the storyteller in a book or movie. One of the most famous literary narrators is Herman Melville's Ishmael, who tells the story of Moby Dick. The narrator is the person who tells the story — in other words, she narrates it. In a fictional work, the narrator is a character who relays the story from her own perspective, which is different from the writer. If you don't trust the narrator's version of the story, you may have encountered an "unreliable narrator." The Latin root is narrare, "to tell or relate," or literally "to make acquainted with," from gnarus, "knowing."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

narrator narrators

The movie projects contempt for the dense from its first frame, sharing a montage of recent pop culture as a stentorian narrator worries that modern conveniences have perverted the concept of survival of the fittest.

From Salon ● Sep. 6, 2026

Dostoevsky follows the narrator over four nights and a morning during which he ceases living in his imagination and embraces reality for the first time.

From Barron's ● Sep. 4, 2026

Audiobook narrator Alice Sockett, who co-founded the campaign, called it "an existential threat to our entire industry".

From BBC ● Aug. 28, 2026

The narrator of “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” ruminates on her grandfather’s childhood encounters with Gregor Mendel, the monk whose experiments with pea plants laid the groundwork for modern genetics.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 24, 2026

Wayne played the narrator, who at different points in the musical just sort of appears onstage and interjects commentary.

From "Drama High" by Michael Sokolove

According to the complaint, Prabhakar had taught the story for nearly a decade without incident and used it in a unit on unsympathetic and unreliable narrators alongside works by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.

From Salon ● Aug. 2, 2026

She and Jackie Hoffman will be two American narrators for the show, while two British actresses perform the scenes.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 28, 2026

Eleven-year-old Margot “Meg” Lefleur, one of the two narrators of Kathryn Stockett’s historical novel “The Calamity Club,” has been a resident of an orphanage in Oxford, Miss., since 1931—two miserable years.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026

“Dear America, if I start investing when I am 16. Nine. Seven. It could change my future. All our futures,” young narrators say.

From MarketWatch ● Feb. 8, 2026

“Perhaps a narrator, then? The narrators have a really important role. They keep the audience informed.”

From "George" by Alex Gino

Related Words

• author
• chronicler
• novelist
• writer