Plot

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /plɒt/

Definitions

1. A secret plan or scheme, or the sequence of events that form the main story in a book, movie, or play
2. A storyline that details a series of events in a narrative or a strategy devised for a particular purpose or outcome
3. The structure of events in a narrative combined with a plan or scheme designed to achieve a specific goal

Etymology: The word's most surprising journey is from a scrap of cloth to a conspiracy. Its earliest English sense, a "plot of ground," meant a small patch or portion of land, and the idea of a patch is still visible in that older meaning. Its ancestry is uncertain: it may come from a Proto-Germanic word for a patch, or it may have arisen when Old English "land-splott," a small portion of land, was reshaped by speakers into "landes-plot," meaning "plot of land," and the shorter form stuck. Related words in Middle Low German and German mean "rags" or "strip of cloth," which suggests the underlying notion was a piece cut from something larger. From the sense of a marked-out piece of ground came the idea of a small plan laid out on paper, and then a scheme or design, the way a land is divided and arranged. The sense of a secret plan to do something harmful grew from this, helped along by the closely related word "complot," a French-derived term for a conspiracy, which reinforced the meaning of a hidden scheme. The story sense, as in the sequence of events in a novel or play, follows the same logic: a story is a pattern of events laid out and arranged, much as a plot of ground is measured and divided.

Synonyms: storyline, narrative, scheme, plan, map

Antonyms: confusion, disorder, chaos, randomness, unstructured