Word of the Day

: January 30, 2022

factoid

noun FAK-toyd

What It Means

A factoid is a brief and usually trivial fact.

// On the back of baseball cards is a chart showing the player's statistics along with one or two interesting factoids about his career.

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factoid in Context

"A girls team from Silver Lake Regional High School has never won a state championship. The soccer program now stands just one win away from changing that factoid." — David Wolcott, Jr., Old Colony Memorial (Plymouth, Massachusetts), 20 Nov. 2021

Did You Know?

We can thank Norman Mailer for factoid: he used the word in his 1973 book Marilyn (about Marilyn Monroe), and he is believed to be the coiner of the word. In the book, he explains that factoids are "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." Mailer's use of the -oid suffix (which traces back to the ancient Greek word eidos, meaning "appearance" or "form") follows in the pattern of humanoid: just as a humanoid appears to be human but is not, a factoid appears to be factual but is not. The word has since evolved so that now it most often refers to things that decidedly are facts, just not ones that are significant.