Zola

American  

[zoh-luh, zaw-la] / ˈzoʊ lə, zɔˈla /

noun

1. Émile 1840–1902, French novelist.

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Zola British  

/ zɔla, ˈzəʊlə /

noun

1. Émile (emil). 1840–1902, French novelist and critic; chief exponent of naturalism. In Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), a cycle of 20 novels, he explains the behaviour of his characters in terms of their heredity: it includes L'Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), Germinal (1885), and La Terre (1887). He is also noted for his defence of Dreyfus in his pamphlet J'accuse (1898)

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Other Word Forms

• Zolaesque
  adjective

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

Zola

People give $100 to $150 in cash per person on average as a wedding gift, according to data from Zola and the Knot.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 7, 2026

"We went to a small village in Malaysia," Tonton Zola Moukoko told me.

From BBC ● May 5, 2026

Sam Sacks praises the Tamil writer Jeyamohan’s novel as “an astonishing work of naturalism” that calls to mind the fiction of Émile Zola.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 30, 2026

Old allegiance, old history, shared blood, old tribes, old paper—Magna Carta, Émile Zola.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 22, 2026

Zola, she is all orange and yellow and turquoise, with three skirts and a blouse and a shawl and a purple ribbon wound around her ankle and green feathers in her hair.

From "The Unfinished Angel" by Sharon Creech