Documentary

//ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi// adj, noun

adj, noun ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner. countable, uncountable

    "Fifteen documentaries are in sharp-elbowed competition to be among the five Oscar nominees."

  2. 2
    a film or TV program presenting the facts about a person or event wordnet
  3. 3
    Such works collectively, as a genre. uncountable

    "Such sequences draw attention to the affective appeals that environmental documentary typically makes, precisely by absenting those appeals."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of, related to, or based on documents. not-comparable
  2. 2
    Which serves to document (record or illustrate) a subject. not-comparable
  3. 3
    Presented objectively without the insertion of fictional matter. not-comparable

    "a documentary film"

Adjective
  1. 1
    (of film, television, radio, or photography) depicting a real-life event using images or interviews with people involved in the event wordnet
  2. 2
    relating to or consisting of or derived from documents wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
realdocumentationaldocumentative3-dabsoluteactual

Example

More examples

"I don't watch a lot of movies, but I can't resist a good documentary."

Etymology

From French adjective and (hence) noun documentaire, from document, from Latin documentum. Equivalent to document + -ary.

Related phrases

documentary hypothesisdrama documentaryfalse documentaryfictional documentary

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.