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narrative

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈnæɹ.ə.tɪv//
  • //ˈnɛɹ.ə.tɪv//
  • /[ˈnɛɹəɾɪv]/
  • //ˈnæɹ.ə.tɪv//
  • /[ˈnæɹəɾɪv]/

Telling a story.

adjective

  1. 1

    Telling a story.

  2. 2

    Overly talkative; garrulous.

    But wise through time, and narrative with age.

  3. 3

    Of or relating to narration.

    the narrative thrust of a film

    There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle Scots narrative, nerrative, from Middle French narratif, from Latin narrātīvus, from narrō (“to narrate”). By surface analysis, Latin narr- + -ate + -ive.

noun

  1. 1

    The systematic recitation of an event or series of events.

  2. 2

    That which is narrated.

  3. 3

    A representation of an event or story in a way to promote a certain point of view.

    changing, controlling the narrative

    Yes, there were instances of grandstanding and obsessive behaviour, but many were concealed at the time to help protect an aggressively peddled narrative of [Oscar] Pistorius the paragon, the emblem, the trailblazer.

    [Alexandra] Bell challenges the dominant coverage of Brown’s killing with the aim of introducing “a perspective and a narrative which is probably how a lot of people from these communities saw it go down”.

    The posters quickly became embroiled in the interminable battle over narrative in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

  4. 4

    A manner of conveying a story, fictional or otherwise, in a body of work.

    The plot is full of holes, but the narrative is extremely compelling.

    The player is free to create their own narrative within a much larger set of possible designed narrative options, or, given the geographic and dialogical openness of Morrowind, to refuse the creation of any narrative but their own and wander aimlessly through the game.

Forms

plural
narratives
comparative
more narrative
superlative
most narrative
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).