Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An account of a person's life written, composed, or produced by another: a film biography of Adlai Stevenson; an oral biography.
- n. Biographies considered as a group, especially when regarded as a genre.
- n. The writing, composition, or production of biographies: a career entirely devoted to biography.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The history of the life of a particular person.
- n. Biographical writing in general, or as a department of literature.
- n. In natural history, the life-history of an animal or a plant. Synonyms Biography, Memoir. When there is a difference between these words, it may be that memoir indicates a less complete or minute account of a person's life, or it may be that the person himself records his own recollections of the past, especially as connected with his own life; in the latter case memoir should be in the plural.
Wiktionary
- n. A person's life story, especially one published.
- v. transitive To write a biography of.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The written history of a person's life.
- n. Biographical writings in general.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an account of the series of events making up a person's life
Etymologies
- From modern Latin biographia, formed from Ancient Greek βίος ("life") + γράφω ("write"). (Wiktionary)
- Late Greek biographiā : Greek bio-, bio- + Greek -graphiā, -graphy. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“And as this historic race between two women candidates for the state's top office nears its conclusion, that gap in her biography is attracting increasing attention.”
“I find it difficult not to acknowledge all the contributions the people in my lab have made, but this biography is already too long.”
“Clue #5: The author of this biography is a man who shares a name with a “lordly” English poet.”
“Throughout, Cook's adherence to the Corps 'traditional leadership principles and knowledge of the Code of Conduct are highlighted, and his biography is a unique case study of exemplary leadership under extremely difficult conditions.”
“Humble to an almost saintly degree he created the theramin "biography" that is known to us today and remained the instrument's unsung creator, content to allow the false story to flourish, so as not to estrange his "familiar music" public.”
“Toward the end of the biography is an extended episode, straight out of Evelyn Waugh at his cruelest, in which the elderly Yeats, having traveled to Majorca with Shri Purohit Swami (a flatulent Hindu mystic with whom he was "translating" the Upanishads) and Lady Gwyneth Foden (a deranged and vindictive fraud whose real name was Gertrude Woolcott), is stricken with nephritis and has to be rescued by his stalwart wife from his suddenly hostile companions, and also from the help offered by his crazed paramour, Margot Ruddock, an aspiring actress.”
“Agency Curtis Brown said the biography is set for worldwide publication on Tutu's 80th birthday in October next year.”
The Guardian: Frankfurt book fair finds publishers in buoyant mood
“Explicitly, the book asks us to weigh ideas of fate: "Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything.”
“Tom Rosenbauer's biography is too long to list here, but rest assured as being head of the Orvis marketing department, and with the company for more than 29 years he's seen and done it all in fly fishing.”
Orvis's Tom Rosenbauer on Small Stream Fishing: Listen to the Locals!
“But alongside the creative interpretations that take place in biography, there is also a pact with accuracy and a responsibility towards likeness.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘biography’.
-
Language
word, sentence, novel, book, novella, vignette, memoir, anthology, paragraph, stanza, poem, haiku and 123 more...
-
Words sung by: Belle and Sebastian
beguiling, herbaceous, peninsula, suffragette, damascan, hastening, berserk, overtime, leccy, bestow, swathe, arab strap and 193 more...
-
bio-
of or relating to life
biology, biohazard, biome, biosphere, biotic, biography, biologist, biographer, biochemistry, biogenesis, autobiography, biostatic and 1 more...
-
9-16 letter words without E
abduction, abolitionist, abomination, actuality, addiction, administration, admission, ambiguous, anticlimactic, application, arachnophobia, arthropathy and 186 more...
-
colleen's words
yellow, green, pie, blue, fur, people, incense, book, brown, avuncular, mountain, fog and 1316 more...
-
Basic English Vocabulary
Very basic words for ESL students.
a, abandon, ability, able, abortion, about, above, abroad, absence, absolute, absolutely, absorb and 4334 more...
-
words I like for one reason or another
nostalgia, corgi, ambiguous, anachronistic, bamboozled, eloquent, emporium, sacrosanct, nascent, obfuscate, miscellaneous, kaleidoscopic and 113 more...
-
-graphy
denoting a science or technique, a style, or a kind of writing
geography, hagiography, calligraphy, radiography, stenography, biography, autobiography
-
big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
-
gre2
aberrant, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate, amalgam and 1781 more...
-
Literally Literary
Words about literature
novel, novella, drabble, serial, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, epic fantasy, science-fantasy, romance, thriller, fiction and 13 more...
-
SAT Literary Terms
allegory, allusion, ambiguity, anecdote, apostrophe, autobiography, biography, characterization, climax, comedy, conclusion, conflict and 37 more...
-
the library - the art of writing
chapter, deus ex machina, epilogue, palindrome, allusion, allegory, prose, epic, conjunction, comma, semicolon, period and 41 more...
-
key
time, space, memory, memoirs, biography, gmail, archive, snapshot, aesthetics, home, house, city and 4 more...
-
bookish
grimoire, bildungsroman, roman a clef, chapbook, picaresque, codicology, epistolary, colophon, manuscript, memoir, incunabulum, bibliomaniac and 47 more...
-
ologies, ographies, onomies, &c.
biology, cartography, zoology, sociology, psychology, hagiography, radiography, biography, anthropology, archaeology, chromatography, mythology and 24 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for biography.
Prolagus
(Me and the Major, by Belle and Sebastian) Apr 27, 2009