Word.ws English Dictionary

real-life

real-life adjective: as happens in real life; not fictional or theoretical; actual as opposed to believed or assumed.

Adjective

real-life (comparative more real-life, superlative most real-life)

  1. As happens in real life; not fictional or theoretical; actual as opposed to believed or assumed.
    • He was a real-life detective before playing one in the movies.
    • Even without hovering drones, a lurking assassin, a thumping score and a denouement, the real-life story of Edward Snowden, a rogue spy on the run, could be straight out of the cinema. But, as with Hollywood, the subplots and exotic locations may distract from the real message: America’s discomfort...2013 June 29, “Travels and travails”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 55
  2. Not online, in real life.

Examples of real-life in a sentence

  • Even without hovering drones, a lurking assassin, a thumping score and a denouement, the real-life story of Edward Snowden, a rogue spy on the run, could be straight out of the cinema.2013 June 29, “Travels and travails”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 55:
  • “How to hide, survive and use the urban environment as a sanctuary was a challenge but the soldiers adapted to the real-life challenges,” ETG Commander Col.2023 October 26, Rojoef Manuel, “British Army Trials Situational Awareness Technologies in Urban Warfare Training”, in The Defense Post...

Forms of real-life

comparativemore real-life
superlativemost real-life
alternative formreallife

Phrases with real-life

Questions about real-life

What does real-life mean?
Real-life means as happens in real life; not fictional or theoretical; actual as opposed to believed or assumed.
How do you use real-life in a sentence?
Even without hovering drones, a lurking assassin, a thumping score and a denouement, the real-life story of Edward Snowden, a rogue spy on the run, could be straight out of the cinema.
What part of speech is real-life?
Real-life is an adjective.

Words near real-life in the dictionary

  1. real-estate
  2. real-estate agent
  3. real-estate agents
  4. real-estate tax
  5. real-estate taxes
  6. real-life
  7. real-life experience
  8. real-life experiences
  9. real-ly
  10. real-person fiction
  11. real-time

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: real-life (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-real-life.ogg.

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