Nonfiction is writing about real facts and real events. History, biography, travel, science, cookery — everything that is not made up.
Libraries and bookshops split their stock in two on this line, and nonfiction is the larger half. The word is defined by what it is not, which is unusual and occasionally awkward, since a shelf holding memoir, recipes and astrophysics has little else in common. Creative nonfiction names true writing that uses the techniques of the novel. British publishing usually hyphenates it as non-fiction and American publishing usually does not, and neither is wrong.
1nounnonfictionWriting that presents real facts and real events rather than invented ones.
“She reads almost nothing but nonfiction.”
Also accepted in games: non-fiction
Middle English
ficcioun
English
fiction
English, today
nonfiction
Built from
From non- + fiction. fiction comes 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