documentary

A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner.

Adjective

  1. Of, related to, or based on documents.

    Synonyms: documentative documentational

  2. Which serves to document (record or illustrate) a subject.

    Synonyms: documentative documentational

  3. Presented objectively without the insertion of fictional matter.
    • a documentary film
    • Just as there is a tradition of history painting, so there is one of history photographs — which of course are not documentary. They're posed as the world was supposed to be. - 1982 February 6, Martin Krieger,...

Origin

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *deḱ-der. Proto-Italic *dokeō Latin doceō Proto-Indo-European *-mn̥ Proto-Indo-European *-mn̥tom Proto-Italic *-mentom Latin -mentum Latin documentumbor. French document Proto-Indo-European *-yósder. Proto-Italic *-āzijos Latin -āriusder. French -aire French documentairebor. English documentary From French adjective and (hence) noun documentaire, from document, from Latin documentum. Equivalent to document + -ary.

Derived

documentarily documentariness documentary hypothesis nondocumentary predocumentary quasidocumentary undocumentary

Noun

  1. A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner.
    • Fifteen documentaries are in sharp-elbowed competition to be among the five Oscar nominees. - 2014 December 4, Brooks Barnes, Michael Cieply, “Documentaries Jostle Against Oscar Obscurity”, in The New York Times,...
    • If you watched Victoria Beckham’s lavishly produced Netflix documentary last October, you might have wondered why it didn’t even glance on the biggest elephant in Brand Beckham’s room[…]. But most big documentaries...
  2. Such works collectively, as a genre.
    • Such sequences draw attention to the affective appeals that environmental documentary typically makes, precisely by absenting those appeals. - 2018, Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, page 61:

Forms

documentaries

Antonyms

fiction

Related

cinéma vérité

Derived

antidocumentary doco docucomedy docudrama docufantasy docufiction docufilm documedia documemoir documentarian documentarist documentarylike documercial docuseries docusoap docutainment drama documentary dramamentary false documentary fictional documentary fuckumentary microdocumentary minidocumentary mockumentary