fiction

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
2. n. The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.
3. n. A lie.
4. n. A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.
5. n. The category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels and short stories.
6. n. Law Something untrue that is intentionally represented as true by the narrator.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act of making or fashioning.
2. n. The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; a false deduction or conclusion: as, to be misled by a mere fiction of the brain.
3. n. That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; a feigned story; an account which is a product of mere imagination; a false statement.
4. n. In literature: A prose work (not dramatic) of the imagination in narrative form; a story; a novel.
5. n. Collectively, literature consisting of imaginative narration; story-telling.
6. n. In a wide sense, not now current, any literary product of the imagination, whether in prose or verse, or in a narrative or dramatic form, or such works collectively.
7. n. In law, the intentional assuming as a fact of what is not such (the truth of the matter not being considered), for the purpose of administering justice without contravening settled rules or making apparent exceptions; a legal device for reforming or extending the application of the law without appearing to alter the law itself. Inasmuch as the courts cannot alter the law, but only declare it and apply it to facts ascertained by them, it was early discovered that the only way in which they could adapt the law to hard cases, or stretch it to new cases, was by pretending a state of facts to fit the rule of law it was thought just to apply. Thus it was a rule of law that a deed takes effect from delivery, and the courts had no power to alter this rule; but if a grantor fraudulently or negligently delayed delivering his deed at the time it bore date, and afterward sought to claim some unjust advantage, as having continued to be owner meanwhile, the courts, not being able to change the rule of law, would by a fiction treat the delivery as relating back to the date. So, when legislation forbade transfers of land unless made publicly by record, the courts allowed an intending grantee to sue, alleging that the land belonged to him, and the intending grantor to suffer judgment to pass; thus by a fiction creating a mode of conveyance which, for all practical purposes, preserved the privacy of titles. Direct methods of improving the rules and forms of law have in recent times superseded the invention, and for the most part the use, of fictions.
8. n. Synonyms Fabrication, figment, fable, untruth, falsehood.

Wiktionary

1. n. Literary type using invented or imaginative writing, instead of real facts, usually written as prose.
2. n. uncountable Invention.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining.
2. n. That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; especially, a feigned or invented story, whether oral or written. Hence: A story told in order to deceive; a fabrication; -- opposed to fact, or reality.
3. n. Fictitious literature; comprehensively, all works of imagination; specifically, novels and romances.
4. n. (Law) An assumption of a possible thing as a fact, irrespective of the question of its truth.
5. n. Any like assumption made for convenience, as for passing more rapidly over what is not disputed, and arriving at points really at issue.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a deliberately false or improbable account
2. n. a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact