fictional

The word 'fictional' is built upon the noun 'fiction', which originates from the Latin verb fingere, meaning "to shape, form, or devise." This verb carried the dual sense of physically molding something and of inventing a story. The abstract noun fictio evolved to denote the act of inventing or a fabricated tale. In English, 'fiction' came to specifically mean a literary genre of invented narratives. The suffix '-al', a productive adjectival marker from Latin, is then appended to create 'fictional', an adjective that directly describes anything pertaining to or characteristic of such invented creations, thus completing the logical path from the ancient concept of shaping to the modern concept of imaginative unreality.