Other forms: fictions
Fiction is stories from imagination, not fact. Read fiction, science fiction, a work of fiction.
Reading it is associated with better understanding of other people's minds, which is a finding that has survived a fair amount of testing. In law, a legal fiction is something treated as true for convenience — a company being a person, for instance. Note that the Latin means a shaping, from fingere.
1nounfictionStories from imagination rather than fact.
“She writes fiction, but her stories are often based on real events.”
fiction is a kind of writing.
Latin fictio means a shaping or feigning, from fingere, to form. Figure, feign and effigy come from the same shaping.
Middle English
ficcioun
English, today
fiction
Built from
From Middle English ficcioun. From Middle English ficcioun, from Old French ficcion (“dissimulation, ruse, invention”), from Latin fictiō (“a making, fashioning, a feigning, a rhetorical or legal fiction”), from fingō (“to form, mold, shape, devise, feign”). Displaced native lēasspell; see feign, feint, figment.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA