Root of the Week: BIO (Monday)

Biography, Biographer, Autobiography  (Noun)

The word biography is formed by connecting the Greek root “bio” with another Greek root, “graph” (which means "writing.") A biography is the written account of a person’s life, though of course biographies can also take other forms.  A film about a person’s life is colloquially called a biopic (i.e. a biographical motion picture). The writer of a biography is a biographer, but when a person writes the story of his or her own life, the work is called an autobiography, from “auto,” meaning “self,” and “bio,” life.  If The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, wasn’t actually written by Alice B. Toklas but rather by her life companion, the unconventional writer Gertrude Stein, that was because Stein had a cheeky disregard for categories.