Word.ws English Dictionary

artistic licence

artistic licence noun: any departure from convention or from factual accuracy taken by an artist to achieve a desired effect.

Noun

artistic licence (uncountable)

  1. Any departure from convention or from factual accuracy taken by an artist to achieve a desired effect.
    • The script takes a little artistic licence with the facts.
    • Serlio criticises the artistic licence taken by both ancient and contemporary architects, here specifically related to the confusion created by the rich decoration of the arch–in his illustrations, he stripped the monument of most of its beautifully […]2017, Allison Sherman, Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, Routledge, →ISBN

Forms of artistic licence

alternative USartistic license

Questions about artistic licence

What does artistic licence mean?
Artistic licence means any departure from convention or from factual accuracy taken by an artist to achieve a desired effect.
What part of speech is artistic licence?
Artistic licence is a noun.

Words near artistic licence in the dictionary

  1. artistes
  2. artistess
  3. artistesses
  4. artistic
  5. artistic gymnastics
  6. artistic licence
  7. artistic license
  8. artistic swimming
  9. artistic temperament
  10. artistic temperaments
  11. artistical

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: artistic licence (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “artistic licence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/artistic_licence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.