novelist
Americannoun
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:
If you’d told readers two decades ago that Whitehead would become a bestselling crime novelist, they might have thought you were kidding.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 20, 2026
Spark was a shapeshifter, capable “of seeming two different women on successive days,” as the novelist David Lodge remarked.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 17, 2026
“As an account of a writer’s formation,” the novelist Anita Brookner wrote in her review, “‘Curriculum Vitae’ is clearly disappointing.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 17, 2026
These days, an annual competition run by Han's martial arts school is held at the "China Bullfighting Hall" amphitheatre, its nameplate inscribed by martial arts novelist Jin Yong.
From Barron's ● Jun. 28, 2026
I explained that it was entirely my fault the rehearsals fell apart, because halfway through I had decided to become a novelist.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
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
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
He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 1, 2026
Philosophers, ministers, judges, novelists and historians have all taken a crack at defining “character.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 19, 2026
The group consists of six novelists and poets, four painters, five cameramen, two broadcasting technicians, fourteen Catholic priests, twelve Protestant ministers, five filmmakers, and more than one hundred journalists.
From "At Last She Stood" by Erin Entrada Kelly
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.
