novel
1 Americannoun
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a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes.
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(formerly) novella.
adjective
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of a new and unusual kind; different from anything seen or known before.
a novel idea.
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not previously detected or reported.
the emergence of novel strains of the virus.
noun
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Roman Law.
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an imperial enactment subsequent and supplementary to an imperial compilation and codification of authoritative legal materials.
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Usually Novels imperial enactments subsequent to the promulgation of Justinian's Code and supplementary to it: one of the four divisions of the Corpus Juris Civilis.
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Civil Law. an amendment to a statute.
noun
adjective
noun
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an extended work in prose, either fictitious or partly so, dealing with character, action, thought, etc, esp in the form of a story
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the literary genre represented by novels
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obsolete (usually plural) a short story or novella, as one of those in the Decameron of Boccaccio
Usage
What is a novel? A novel is a long work of fiction written in prose that tells a narrative involving characters and usually involving an organized set of actions occurring in a setting.Let’s break that down. Fiction is a type of writing (literature) that involves characters that don’t exist or people (usually famous) who have been reimagined (fictionalized). The events in fiction are made up, or, in the case of historic events, were fictionalized.Prose is the ordinary manner of writing that we use, that is, using complete sentences and not poetic verses. A narrative is a telling of events or experiences. Stories and essays are narratives.A setting is a story’s location and time. Some novels take place in our own time and place, while others take place in the past, in another country, in the future, and even in space or on other planets (real or made-up).Length is usually the key difference between works of fiction. While there are no official rules, a novel is generally at least 50,000 words, and many novels are much longer than this. By contrast, a short story is often 1,000 to 10,000 words, although flash fiction can be as short as 500 words. A novella (a short novel) is somewhere in between a short story and a novel.
Related Words
See new.
Other Word Forms
- novellike adjective
Etymology
Origin of novel1
First recorded in 1560–70; from Italian novella (storia) “new (story)”; novel 2
Origin of novel1
First recorded in 1375–1425; late Middle English, from Anglo-French, Middle French novel, from Old French novel, nouvel, from Latin novellus “fresh, young, novel,” diminutive of novus “new”; new
Origin of novel1
First recorded in 1605–15; from Late Latin novella (constitūtiō) “a new (regulation, order)”; novel 2
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.
Through their eyes, this thoughtful and deeply humane novel exposes some of the contradictions and quiet duplicities of ordinary life.
The debut novel from Van Jensen, a veteran comic-book writer, develops this unusual premise in a surprisingly pedestrian way.
In their fiction—mostly novels for Woolf, short stories for Mansfield—they experimented by replacing linear narrative and descriptive detail with suggestion and symbolism.
Paradoxically, at virtually the same time, the many stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which dramatized, or melodramatized, the brutality of slavery, were an enduring sensation.
In place of sheet music, he had a novel propped up.
From Literature
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.
