Search the Dictionary

The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind. Bp. Stillingfleet.

Pertaining to, or characterized by, fiction; fictitious; romantic."Fictional rather than historical." Latham.

A writer of fiction. [R.] Lamb.

s. -- Crocodile tears, false or affected tears; hypocritical sorrow; -- derived from the fiction of old travelers, that crocodiles shed tears over their prey.

Affiction regarded as a test of patience or virtue; trial; disappointment; opposition; misfortune. Heaven prepares a good man with crosses. B. Jonson.

gy of the Spartan kings, when it is admitted that eponymous persons are to be canceled as fictions Grote.

a fiction by which a public minister, though actually in a foreign country, is supposed still to remain within the territory of his own sovereign or nation. Wheaton.

Fiction; untruth; falsehood. It would look like a fable to report that this gentleman gives away a great fortune by secret methods. Addison.

To invent, compose, or relate fables or fictions. G. S. Faber.

An invention; a fiction; something feigned or imagined. Social figments, feints, and formalism. Mrs. Browning. It carried rather an appearance of figment and invention . . . than of truth and reality. Woodward.

igree basket. Hence: Fanciful; unsubstantial; merely decorative. You ask for reality, not fiction and filigree work. J. C. Shairp.

A place or time of punishment, affiction, or great trial; severe experience or discipline. Deut. iv. 20. Bustamente furnace, a shaft furnace for roasting quicksilver ores. -- Furnace bridge, Same as Bridge wall. See Bridge, n., 5. -- Furnace cadmiam or cadmia, the oxide of zinc which accumulates in the chimneys of fu…

Oppression; cruel exaction; affiction; pinching distress; as, the gripe of poverty.

A fiction object or picture created by the imagination; the same when proposed as a pattern to be copied, or a standard to be reached; one of the archetypes or patterns of created things, conceived by the Platonists to have excited objectively from eternity in the mind of the Deity. Thence to behold this new-created wo…

An intricate, complicated plot, as of a drama or work of fiction.

A fabrication to deceive; a fiction; a forgery; a falsehood. Filling their hearers With strange invention. Shak.

A fiction; a fable; an untruth. Dryden.

A feigning to believe, as in the play of children; a mere pretense; a fiction; an invention. "Childlike make-believe." Tylor. To forswear self-delusion and make-believe. M. Arnold.

n which anything is designed or fitted to teach; the doctrine meant to be inculcated by a fiction; a maxim. Thus may we gather honey from the weed, And make a moral of the devil himself. Shak. To point a moral, or adorn a tale. Johnson. We protest against the principle that the world of pure comedy is one into which no…

An extravagant fiction embodying an account of some marvelous exploit or adventure.