Standard Lemma guide

emplotment

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

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1

noun

Meaning 1

The assembly of a series of historical events into a narrative with a plot.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Usage: countable, uncountable

Topics: historiography, history, human-sciences, sciences

Examples

  • 1978, Hayden White, "The Historical Text As Literary Artifact", re-printed in Geoffrey Roberts (editor), The History and Narrative Reader, Routledge (2001), →ISBN, page 223, Yet, I would argue, histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their success in making stories out of mere chronicles; and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called “emplotment.” And by emplotment I mean simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with “fictions” in general.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

From em- + plot + -ment; coined by Paul Ricœur.