novel
/ˈnɑvəl/adjective, noun
New or unusual; an extended fictional prose work
From Latin novellus (new).
Lineage
The story
Picture a Roman describing something as novellus: not merely new, but freshly minted, young, or pleasantly unfamiliar—the linguistic equivalent of spotting a strange new gadget in the marketplace. English borrowed the adjective through Old French, where novel could mean “new,” “recent,” or “rare,” and it appears in English by the Middle English period. The literary sense took a more winding Mediterranean route: Italian novella meant a “new thing,” a piece of news, and eventually a short narrative, giving English both novella and the longer novel. By the early 1600s, the adjective was becoming established in English, while prose fiction gradually claimed the noun. The same family also gives us novelty, so a novel idea and a novelty item are cousins wearing different outfits: one may change your thinking, the other may merely sit on a shelf collecting dust.
Modern usage
An extremely long text or comment
- Heard in
- internet comments · informal online speech
- See
- Urban Dictionary entry describing a very long text or comment