Words & WritingGreek → English
Biography
/baɪˈɒɡrəfi/noun
An account of a person's life written by someone else.
The Greek roots
βίος
bíos
life, course of life
γράφειν
gráphein
to write
Literally: “life-writing”
The story of the word
The compound βιογραφία is late Greek, not classical: Plutarch wrote βίοι, lives, without needing a name for the genre. English acquired biography in the seventeenth century, and Dryden used it in 1683 when introducing Plutarch to English readers. The βίος inside it is a life as lived, a career with a shape, as distinct from ζωή, life as the bare fact of being alive, which is the one that gave biology its first syllable.
- How it travelled
- Late Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
biologyautobiographygraphitephotograph
In a sentence
The biography runs to nine hundred pages and stops before he turned fifty.
She refused to authorise a biography while any of the children were alive.