documentary

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

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/, /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tə.ɹi/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (General American, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˌdɑ.kjəˈmɛn.tə.ɹi/, /ˌdɑ.kjəˈmɛn.tɹi/

  • Audio (Texas):

    (file)

documentary (not comparable)

1. Of, related to, or based on documents.

   Synonyms: documentative, documentational

2. Which serves to document (record or illustrate) a subject.

   Synonyms: documentative, documentational

3. (of a film, book, etc) Presented objectively without the insertion of fictional matter.

   a documentary film

   • 1982 February 6, Martin Krieger, “Stark/Erotic”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 28, page 10:

     Just as there is a tradition of history painting, so there is one of history photographs — which of course are not documentary. They're posed as the world was supposed to be.

English Wikipedia has an article on:

documentary film

Wikipedia

documentary (countable and uncountable, plural documentaries)

1. A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner.
   • 2014 December 4, Brooks Barnes, Michael Cieply, “Documentaries Jostle Against Oscar Obscurity”, in The New York Times, retrieved 28 June 2015:

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

   • 2026 January 20, Marina Hyde, “It’s a Brooklyn v Beckham Inc disaster: what happens when the elephant in the room goes rogue”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     If you watched Victoria Beckham’s lavishly produced Netflix documentary last October, you might have wondered why it didn’t even glance on the biggest elephant in Brand Beckham’s room […] . But most big documentaries these days aren’t documentaries any more in the way previous practitioners of the craft might have understood the word. As her husband’s was before it, Victoria’s doc was a self-commissioned advertorial on which the subject also served as executive producer.

2. (uncountable) Such works collectively, as a genre.
   • 2018, Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, page 61:

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

• fiction

• cinéma vérité

• countrymade