BIOGRAPHY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does biography mean? 

• BIOGRAPHY (noun)
  The noun BIOGRAPHY has 1 sense:

1. an account of the series of events making up a person's life

  Familiarity information: BIOGRAPHY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• BIOGRAPHY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

An account of the series of events making up a person's life

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

biography; life; life history; life story

Hypernyms ("biography" is a kind of...):

account; chronicle; history; story (a record or narrative description of past events)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "biography"):

autobiography (a biography of yourself)

hagiography (a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint))

profile (biographical sketch)

Instance hyponyms:

Parallel Lives (a collection of biographies of famous pairs of Greeks and Romans written by Plutarch; used by Shakespeare in writing some of his plays)

Derivation:

biographer (someone who writes an account of a person's life)

biographical (of or relating to or being biography)

 Context examples 

Just give me down my index of biographies from the shelf.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A published record of a person's death that usually includes a brief biography and details of the funeral arrangements.

(Obituary, NCI Thesaurus)

Susan had read nothing, and Fanny longed to give her a share in her own first pleasures, and inspire a taste for the biography and poetry which she delighted in herself.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

In this case I found her biography sandwiched in between that of a Hebrew rabbi and that of a staff-commander who had written a monograph upon the deep-sea fishes.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

But these recriminations, twice mentioned in his skeleton biography, could only mean that he was a fanatic in science.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Most of the books were locked up behind glass doors; but there was one bookcase left open containing everything that could be needed in the way of elementary works, and several volumes of light literature, poetry, biography, travels, a few romances, &c.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange twopence, a glass of half-and-half, two fills of shag tobacco, and as much information as I could desire about Miss Adler, to say nothing of half a dozen other people in the neighbourhood in whom I was not in the least interested, but whose biographies I was compelled to listen to.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)