fiction

英文词源

fiction

fiction: [14] Fiction is literally ‘something made or invented’ – and indeed that was the original meaning of the word in English. It seems always to have been used in the sense ‘story or set of “facts” invented’ rather than of some concrete invention, however, and by the end of the 16th century it was being applied specifically to a literary genre of ‘invented narrative’. The word comes via Old French from Latin fictiō, a derivative of the verb fingere ‘make, shape’, from which English also gets effigy, faint, feign, figure, and figment.
=> effigy, faint, feign, figure, figment

fiction (n.)

early 15c., ficcioun, "that which is invented or imagined in the mind," from Old French ficcion "dissimulation, ruse; invention, fabrication" (13c.) and directly from Latin fictionem (nominative fictio) "a fashioning or feigning," noun of action from past participle stem of fingere "to shape, form, devise, feign," originally "to knead, form out of clay," from PIE *dheigh- "to build, form, knead" (source also of Old English dag "dough;" see dough).

Meaning "prose works (not dramatic) of the imagination" is from 1590s, at first often including plays and poems. Narrower sense of "the part of literature comprising novels and short stories based on imagined scenes or characters" is by early 19c. The legal sense (fiction of law) is from 1580s. A writer of fiction could be a fictionist (1827). The related Latin words included the literal notion "worked by hand," as well as the figurative senses of "invented in the mind; artificial, not natural": Latin fictilis "made of clay, earthen;" fictor "molder, sculptor" (also borrowed 17c. in English), but also of Ulysses as "master of deceit;" fictum "a deception, falsehood; fiction."