point of view

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Calque of French point de vue.[1]

Pronunciation

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Noun

point of view (plural points of view)

  1. A position from which something is perceived; outlook; standpoint.
    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.
    His point of view is that there is only one true religion.
  3. (literary theory) The perspective from which a narrative is related.
    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.

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See also

References

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

Further reading

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