Words & WritingGreek → English
Autobiography
/ˌɔːtəbaɪˈɒɡrəfi/noun
An account of a life written by the person who lived it.
The Greek roots
αὐτός
autós
self, same
βίος
bíos
life
γράφειν
gráphein
to write
Literally: “self-life-writing”
The story of the word
The word turns up in English in 1797, in a Monthly Review notice where William Taylor found it pedantic and proposed self-biography instead. Robert Southey used autobiography without apology in 1809 and it settled. The middle piece is the load-bearing one: βίος is a life with a course and a career, which is why an autobiography is expected to cover events rather than the inner self, a job the word never promised.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1797
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
biographyautographautomaticautonomy
In a sentence
He wrote the autobiography in eleven months and disowned it in ten years.
Her autobiography stops abruptly in 1974 with no explanation.