Pronounced: NIM-rod, noun
Notes: An interesting background
Yesterday’s phrase
The phrase roman à clef is “a novel in which real persons or actual events figure in disguise” (an possibly not very well disguised).
First usage
Our phrase came into English in the late 1800s
Background / Comments
In Agatha Christie’s novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, Hercule Poirot is traveling on the Blue Train, and at one dinner, he shares a table with a younger woman, and says “I see, madame, you have a roman policier. You are fond of such things?”. She replies, “They amuse me.” This phrase is as close as I’ve come to our phrase. A roman policier is a detective story, but (unlike our phrase) is not an English phrase. Back in the late 1800s, such books included a key so that people could match the fictional characters to the real-life people – and thus was born our phrase, which came from a French phrase meaning “a novel with a key”.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 