FICTION

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does fiction mean? 

• FICTION (noun)
  The noun FICTION has 2 senses:

1. a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact

2. a deliberately false or improbable account

  Familiarity information: FICTION used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FICTION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

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

literary composition; literary work (imaginative or creative writing)

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

dystopia (a work of fiction describing an imaginary place where life is extremely bad because of deprivation or oppression or terror)

novel (an extended fictional work in prose; usually in the form of a story)

fantasy; phantasy (fiction with a large amount of imagination in it)

story (a piece of fiction that narrates a chain of related events)

utopia (a work of fiction describing a utopia)

Derivation:

fictional (related to or involving literary fiction)

fictionalize (make into fiction)

fictitious (formed or conceived by the imagination)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A deliberately false or improbable account

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

fable; fabrication; fiction

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

falsehood; falsity; untruth (a false statement)

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

canard (a deliberately misleading fabrication)

Derivation:

fictional (formed or conceived by the imagination)

fictionalize (make into fiction)

fictitious (adopted in order to deceive)

 Context examples 

He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of magazine fiction.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

“His human fictions, as you choose to call them, make for nobility and manhood. You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals. You are a pauper.”

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

A pleasing fiction, by the way, for Jo had no more idea of music than a grasshopper.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

That is a fiction—an impudent invention to vex me.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The new planet circles Proxima Centauri, the smallest member of a triple star system known to science fiction fans everywhere as Alpha Centauri.

(ESO Discovers Earth-Size Planet in Habitable Zone of Nearest Star, NASA)

Science fiction writers have long featured terraforming, the process of creating an Earth-like or habitable environment on another planet, in their stories.

(Mars Terraforming Not Possible Using Present-Day Technology, NASA)

If the name eps Eri sounds familiar, you may have already heard of it as the setting for the science fiction television series Babylon 5.

(New Observation of Nearby Star System Confirms Similarity to Ours, VOA)

Tau Ceti, a favorite destination of science fiction writers, is very similar to the sun both in size and brightness.

(Potentially Habitable 'Super-Earths' Found Orbiting around Sun's near Neighbor, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

If the censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)