Pathography

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A biography that highlights the negative aspects of its subject's life.

    "Though this has been an era of magisterial biographies by such writers as Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, Joseph Frank, Judith Thurman and Justin Kaplan, among others, it has also evolved a new subspecies of the genre to which the name "pathography" might usefully be given: hagiography's diminished and often prurient twin."

  2. 2
    A biography that explores the effects of a disease on its subject's life.

Synonyms

All synonyms
misery litmisery lit

Example

More examples

"Though this has been an era of magisterial biographies by such writers as Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, Joseph Frank, Judith Thurman and Justin Kaplan, among others, it has also evolved a new subspecies of the genre to which the name "pathography" might usefully be given: hagiography's diminished and often prurient twin."

Etymology

From patho- + -graphy.

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