Meaning & use

anecdote

noun·Academic

A short, entertaining story about a real person or event, often told to illustrate a point.

See it in a sentence

The professor opened her lecture with an anecdote about her first failed experiment.

He kept the guests laughing with anecdotes from his years working on cruise ships.

A note on using this word

An anecdote is personal and usually brief; unlike statistics, it offers only limited evidence for a general claim.

Words with a similar meaning

storytale

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

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