emplotment
emplotment noun: the assembly of a series of historical events into a narrative with a plot.
Noun
emplotment (countable and uncountable, plural emplotments)
- The assembly of a series of historical events into a narrative with a plot.
- 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...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
Forms of emplotment
| plural | emplotments |
|---|
Origin of emplotment
From em- + plot + -ment; coined by Paul Ricœur.
Questions about emplotment
- What does emplotment mean?
- Emplotment means the assembly of a series of historical events into a narrative with a plot.
- What part of speech is emplotment?
- Emplotment is a noun.
- What is the plural of emplotment?
- The plural of emplotment is emplotments.
Words near emplotment in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: emplotment (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “emplotment.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/emplotment. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.