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point of view

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Etymology

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Calque of French point de vue.[1]

Pronunciation

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  • Audio (US):(file)

Noun

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point of view (plural points of view)

  1. A position from which something is seen.
    Alternative forms: POV, point-of-view
    Synonyms: viewpoint, standpoint, outlook, perspective
    From the operator's point of view, there is a large blind spot on one side of the machine.
    From an economist's point of view, business is all about money.
    • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
      From another point of view, it was a place without a soul. The well-to-do had hearts of stone; the rich were brutally bumptious; the Press, the Municipality, all the public men, were ridiculously, vaingloriously self-satisfied.
    • 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Protheans: Cipher Codex entry:
      It has been suggested that Prothean data recording is highly dependent on a certain point of view, what Carl Jung described as the collective unconscious. The 'cipher' needed to comprehend the images implanted in Shepard's mind is the cultural knowledge of a Prothean: the archetypes, biological instincts, and common experiences universal to the race.
  2. An attitude, opinion, or set of beliefs.
    Alternative forms: POV, point-of-view
    Synonyms: viewpoint, standpoint, outlook, perspective
    Near-synonyms: slant, bias
    His point of view is that there is only one true religion.
  3. (literary theory) The perspective from which a narrative is related.
    Alternative forms: POV, point-of-view
    Synonyms: viewpoint, perspective
    The storyline in the film “The Usual Suspects” is presented from the point of view of an unreliable narrator.
    • 1999, Lise Menn, Akio Kamio, Makoto Hayashi, Ikuyo Fujita, Sumiko Sasanuma, Larry Boles, “The Role of Empathy in Sentence Production”, in Akio Kamio, Ken-ichi Takami, editors, Function and Structure[1], page 331:
      Therefore, there may be no overt indication of viewpoint, either because the speaker fails to mark his or her viewpoint, or because he or she takes a neutral point of view.

Derived terms

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Translations

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2025), “point of view”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

Further reading

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