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biography

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//baɪˈɒɡɹəfi//
  • United States//baɪˈɑɡɹəfi//

A person's life story, especially one published.

noun

  1. 1

    A person's life story, especially one published.

    There are many biographies of Benjamin Franklin.

  2. 2

    The art of writing this kind of story.

    She is best known for biography and history, but she is also a novelist.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *gʷeyh₃-der. Ancient Greek βίος (bíos) Proto-Indo-European *gerbʰ- Proto-Hellenic *grə́pʰō Ancient Greek γρᾰ́φω (grắphō) Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Hellenic *-ā́ Ancient Greek -ᾱ (-ā) Ancient Greek -η (-ē) Ancient Greek γραφή (graphḗ) Ancient Greek -γραφία (-graphía) Ancient Greek βιογραφίᾱ (biographíā)der. New Latin biographiabor. English biography Borrowed from New Latin biographia, from Ancient Greek βιογραφίᾱ (biographíā), from βίος (bíos, life) + -γραφία (-graphía, writing).

verb

  1. 1

    To write a biography of.

Forms

plural
biographies
past tense
biographied
past participle
biographied
present participle
biographying
third person singular
biographies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).