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:
The year before they had published “I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian novelist who died 20 years before — hardly a guaranteed success.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 19, 2026
And it seems to me that the country has a formidable present-day contender, the novelist Anjet Daanje.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 18, 2026
Winn had repeatedly claimed The Salt Path was the first book she had written, and which she won a number of accolades for, including a £10,000 prize for a debut novelist or non-fiction writer.
From BBC ● Aug. 17, 2026
A novelist explores narrative, making sense of themes, motifs and sensations to try to communicate about the complexity of a globe with some eight billion people in it.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026
Writers and intellectuals, such as the world-famous novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose books depicted life in Soviet prison camps or gulags, were lucky by comparison—he merely found himself permanently ejected from his homeland in 1974.
From "Spies: The Secret Showdown Between America and Russia" by Marc Favreau
But at our best, we novelists probe deeper truths precisely because the facts cannot always, ever, be totally known.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026
When not looking backward, or inward to personal traumas, American novelists have turned their gaze to the uncertain future.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
It also earned 28-year-old Salam a place on the Observer's list of the best debut novelists of 2026, with the paper saying "his raucous, wildly inventive prose is bound for a much bigger audience".
From BBC ● May 22, 2026
It’s quickly becoming apparent that Luiselli is one of the country’s most gifted novelists.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 12, 2026
This was what the novelists meant by suffering.
From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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.
