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PlainSpell

metanarrative

noun, adjective

metanarrative is a noun meaning “A narrative which concerns narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge and offers legitimation of such through the anticipated…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled M-E-T-A-N-A-R-R-A-T-I-V-E, and it appears about once in every 42 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of metanarrative is metanarratives.

What does metanarrative mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A narrative which concerns narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge and offers legitimation of such through the anticipated completion of some master idea; a grand story that is self-legitimizing.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or relating to a metanarrative.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Forms of metanarrative

  • metanarratives plural
  • meta-narrative

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is metanarrative?

Metanarrative appears about once in every 42 million words in written English, the 199,120th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Metanarrative in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge:

LanguageWords
Frenchmétarécit, grand récit
Germanmeistererzählung, metanarrativ
Portuguesemetanarrativa
Spanishmetanarrativa, metarrelato, macrorrelato, grandes narrativas, grandes relatos

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does metanarrative come from?

From meta- (“transcending; of a level above”) + narrative (“recitation of a story”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).