Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary - story

(stories) Frequency: The word is one of the 700 most common words in English. 1. A story is a description of imaginary people and events, which is written or told in order to entertain. I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits. ...a popular love story with a happy ending. N-COUNT 2. A story is a description of an event or something that happened to someone, especially a spoken description of it. The parents all shared interesting stories about their children... Isak’s story is typical of a child who has a specific learning disability. N-COUNT 3. The story of something is a description of all the important things that have happened to it since it began. ...the story of the women’s movement in Ireland. N-COUNT: usu N of n 4. If someone invents a story, they give a false explanation or account of something. He invented some story about a cousin. = tale, yarn N-COUNT 5. A news story is a piece of news in a newspaper or in a news broadcast. Those are some of the top stories in the news... They’ll do anything for a story. ...front-page news stories. N-COUNT 6. see storey see -storey 7. see also cock-and-bull story, short story, sob story, success story, tall story 8. In British English, you use to cut a long story short to indicate that you are going to state the final result of an event and not give any more details. In American English, you say to make a long story short. To cut a long story short, I ended up as managing director. PHRASE: V inflects 9. You use a different story to refer to a situation, usually a bad one, which exists in one set of circumstances when you have mentioned that it does not exist in another set of circumstances. Where Marcella lives, the rents are fairly cheap, but a little further north it’s a different story. PHRASE: usu v-link PHR 10. If you say it’s the same old story or it’s the old story, you mean that something unpleasant or undesirable seems to happen again and again. It’s the same old story. They want one person to do three people’s jobs. PHRASE: v-link PHR 11. If you say that something is only part of the story or is not the whole story, you mean that the explanation or information given is not enough for a situation to be fully understood. This may be true but it is only part of the story... Jane goes to great lengths to explain that this is not the whole story. PHRASE: usu v-link PHR 12. If someone tells you their side of the story, they tell you why they behaved in a particular way and why they think they were right, when other people think that person behaved wrongly. He had already made up his mind before even hearing her side of the story. PHRASE: side inflects