Different word for fiction

The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple. It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. For example, if you type something like «longing for a time in the past», then the engine will return «nostalgia». The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it’s starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. So in a sense, this tool is a «search engine for words», or a sentence to word converter.

I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren’t included in thesauri. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. waves, sunsets, trees, etc.).

In case you didn’t notice, you can click on words in the search results and you’ll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, @HubSpot, WordNet, and @mongodb.

Please note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.

Below is a massive list of fiction words — that is, words related to fiction. The top 4 are: fantasy, novel, story and narrative. You can get the definition(s) of a word in the list below by tapping the question-mark icon next to it. The words at the top of the list are the ones most associated with fiction, and as you go down the relatedness becomes more slight. By default, the words are sorted by relevance/relatedness, but you can also get the most common fiction terms by using the menu below, and there’s also the option to sort the words alphabetically so you can get fiction words starting with a particular letter. You can also filter the word list so it only shows words that are also related to another word of your choosing. So for example, you could enter «fantasy» and click «filter», and it’d give you words that are related to fiction and fantasy.

You can highlight the terms by the frequency with which they occur in the written English language using the menu below. The frequency data is extracted from the English Wikipedia corpus, and updated regularly. If you just care about the words’ direct semantic similarity to fiction, then there’s probably no need for this.

There are already a bunch of websites on the net that help you find synonyms for various words, but only a handful that help you find related, or even loosely associated words. So although you might see some synonyms of fiction in the list below, many of the words below will have other relationships with fiction — you could see a word with the exact opposite meaning in the word list, for example. So it’s the sort of list that would be useful for helping you build a fiction vocabulary list, or just a general fiction word list for whatever purpose, but it’s not necessarily going to be useful if you’re looking for words that mean the same thing as fiction (though it still might be handy for that).

If you’re looking for names related to fiction (e.g. business names, or pet names), this page might help you come up with ideas. The results below obviously aren’t all going to be applicable for the actual name of your pet/blog/startup/etc., but hopefully they get your mind working and help you see the links between various concepts. If your pet/blog/etc. has something to do with fiction, then it’s obviously a good idea to use concepts or words to do with fiction.

If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the list below, or if there’s some sort of bug and it’s not displaying fiction related words, please send me feedback using this page. Thanks for using the site — I hope it is useful to you! 🐉

Last Updated:
28 Mar 2023
— Updated example sentences