Other forms: novels
A novel is an invented story long enough to fill a book. The paperback that goes in your bag for the beach, the six-hundred-page one everybody claims to have finished, the novel your teacher made you read at fourteen.
The adjective catches learners out, because it means something else: new in kind, never tried before. A novel approach, a novel treatment, a novel way round the problem. It belongs to scientists, lawyers and reviewers rather than the bus stop, and from it come novelty — newness, and also the cheap little toy sense — and novelist. One thing to get right: a novel is fiction. A true account is a memoir or a work of non-fiction, and calling one a novel is the slip that gives a learner away.
1nounnovelA book-length invented story.~78%
“She wrote her first novel at fifty and threw the second away.”
2adjectivenewNew in kind; not done or tried before.~22%
“The team took a novel approach to a very old problem.”
synonyms: original, innovative, unprecedented
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
NOVel → NEW: a new kind of story, and a new idea
From the Latin for new. It was a new kind of story when it arrived, and the older meaning never went away, so a novel idea is simply a new one.
hooks ontonew
Novel means new, and always did. English took it from Old French novel, "new, fresh, recent, strange, rare", from Latin novellus, "new, fresh, young", which was the little brother of novus, "new", right back to the Proto-Indo-European root *new-. The adjective still wears that first meaning plainly; nouveau is the same word arriving later by the same road.
Proto-Indo-European
*new- (new)
Latin
novellus — new, fresh, young, modern
Old French
novel — new, fresh, recent, recently made or done, strange, rare
Middle English
novel
English, today
novel
Built from
From Middle English novel, from Old French novel (“new, fresh, recent, recently made or done, strange, rare”) (modern nouvel, nouveau), from Latin novellus (“new, fresh, young, modern”), diminutive of novus (“new”). a doublet of nouveau.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA