Word.ws English Dictionary

lad lit

lad lit noun: male-authored popular novels about young men and their emotional and personal lives.

Noun

lad lit (uncountable)

  1. (UK) Male-authored popular novels about young men and their emotional and personal lives.
    • Publishers have been trying for years to find a winning formula for men's fiction. From lad lit to dad lit to bad lit, men have been barraged with an array of reading matter since Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary stormed up the bestseller lists and into our lives in 1997.2004 June 6, Jonathan Heawood, “You couldn't make it up”, in The Observer
    • Just Like You could stand alone as the ladlit-meets-mumlit social satire that it is, its vicious wit paradoxically interwoven with tenderness and empathy.2020 September 18, Joanna Briscoe, “Just Like You by Nick Hornby review – ladlit meets mumlit”, in The Guardian

Forms of lad lit

alternative formladlit
alternative formlad-lit

Origin of lad lit

Modeled on lad mag and perhaps chick lit.

Questions about lad lit

What does lad lit mean?
Lad lit means male-authored popular novels about young men and their emotional and personal lives.
What part of speech is lad lit?
Lad lit is a noun.

Words near lad lit in the dictionary

  1. lacydonid
  2. lacydonids
  3. Laczny
  4. lad
  5. lad culture
  6. lad lit
  7. lad mag
  8. lad mags
  9. lad of wax
  10. lad's love
  11. lad's mag

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lad lit (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: “lad lit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lad_lit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.