- Today's Word
Verisimilitude
vair-ih-sih-MIL-ih-tood
Definition
(noun) The quality of appearing to be true or real; the convincing believability of a story, account, or portrayal.
Example
The novelist spent months researching 19th-century London to give her story the verisimilitude it needed.
Word Origin
From Latin verisimilitudo, built from verus (“true”) + similis (“like, similar”) + the suffix -tudo (forming abstract nouns). Essentially, it means “the likeness of truth.” The word entered English in the 17th century, first appearing in literary and rhetorical criticism.
Fun Fact
Aristotle was one of the first thinkers to formally discuss this concept — he argued in the Poetics that a believable impossibility is more valuable in storytelling than an unbelievable possibility. In other words, a story that feels true matters more than one that’s merely factually accurate. This idea shaped centuries of Western storytelling. Method acting, elaborate film sets, historical fiction research, and immersive video game worlds are all modern descendants of the ancient pursuit of verisimilitude.