Word.ws English Dictionary

weird fiction

weird fiction noun: a macabre subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th century, pre-dating the horror and fantasy genres.

Noun

weird fiction (uncountable)

  1. A macabre subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th century, pre-dating the horror and fantasy genres.
    • Weird fiction is, after all, notoriously typified by the presence of entities so radically different from normality that they are, to borrow a characteristic phrase from H. P. Lovecraft, “impossible to describe” (Lovecraft 2014: 404).2020, Julius Greve, Florian Zappe, editors, The American Weird: Concept and Medium, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, pages 30–31

Origin of weird fiction

Popularized by H. P. Lovecraft.

Questions about weird fiction

What does weird fiction mean?
Weird fiction means a macabre subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th century, pre-dating the horror and fantasy genres.
What part of speech is weird fiction?
Weird fiction is a noun.

Words near weird fiction in the dictionary

  1. weir
  2. Weir Views
  3. weirangle
  4. weird
  5. weird and wonderful
  6. weird fiction
  7. weird flex but ok
  8. weird flex, but ok
  9. weird looking
  10. weird matching
  11. weird number

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: weird fiction (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: “weird fiction.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/weird_fiction. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.