novelist
Americannoun
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novelists
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of novelist
Explanation
Someone who writes fictional books is a novelist. If your favorite novelist is Stephen King, it means you're a fan of the horror genre. When someone writes a novel, a book-length, made-up story, they can describe themselves as a novelist. Some novelists also write non-fiction, poetry, or short stories, and you can also simply call them a "writer" or an "author." Novelist was coined to mean "fiction writer" in the 1720s from novel, though the word existed earlier with several different meanings, including "news-carrier" and "innovator."
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:
While I’m hesitant to claim that Schoenbrun’s primary strength is as a novelist rather than a filmmaker, “Public Access Afterworld” goes some distance toward making that case.
From Salon ● Oct. 29, 2026
Dracula comes from Central Europe by way of the Irish novelist Bram Stoker; the werewolf is a staple of French and German folk tales.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 28, 2026
It’s a place most dream of escaping; instead L.A.-born novelist Alexander Maksik takes readers inside the airport to witness both the unease and shared humanity of people passing through.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 28, 2026
The prolific novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates introduces readers to Julia, one half of a couple whose long marriage has come to contain strange, submerged, undiscussable elements in “The Disappearing.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026
He was arguably more like a novelist than a composer in this respect, people falling for his music as they would a newly discovered secret passion.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
His library contained more than 600 volumes, ranging from Tacitus and Shakespeare to contemporary novelists, poets and dramatists.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2026
Its suggestiveness has made music a subject of perennial fascination to novelists, who work with a very different tool.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 28, 2026
Tens of thousands of comments on BookTok, a popular book community on TikTok, attest to the popularity of one of Russia's greatest novelists with the social media generation.
From Barron's ● Sep. 4, 2026
But within this current crop of TV movies and series, many novelists have been content to serve in a consultant capacity and leave the scripts to the screenwriters.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 10, 2026
This was what the novelists meant by suffering.
From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
