From Late Greek 'biographia,' 'bios' (life) + 'graphia' (writing) — literally 'life-writing,' the genre of recounting another person's life.
An account of a person's life written by someone else; the genre of such writing.
From Late Greek 'biographia,' a compound of 'bios' (life, mode of living, lifetime, livelihood) + 'graphia' (writing, a written account), from 'graphein' (to write, to scratch, to engrave), from PIE *gerbh- (to scratch, to carve). The first element 'bios' traces to PIE *gwei- (to live), the same root that gives 'biology,' 'biome,' 'biosphere,' 'antibiotic,' and the entire bio- prefix throughout science. The second element from PIE *gerbh- underlies 'graphic,' 'graph,' 'grammar,' 'graffiti,' and 'carve' through Germanic
Greek had two words for 'life': 'bios' (βίος, the course of a life, a way of living) and 'zoē' (ζωή, the biological fact of being alive). 'Biography' uses 'bios' because it concerns how a life was lived, not the mere fact of living. This distinction survives in English: 'biology' and 'biography' use 'bio-,' while 'zoo,' 'zoology,' and 'protozoa' use 'zo-.'