prose

Spoken or written language without regular metre; in literature, prose corresponds more closely to the patterns of everyday speech than poetry, and often uses standard grammar and syntax and traditional rhetoric to achieve its ends.

In Western literature prose was traditionally used for what is today called non‐fiction – that is, history, biography, essays, and so on – while verse was used for imaginative literature. Prose came into its own as a vehicle for fiction with the rise of the novel in the 18th century. In modern literature, the distinction between poetry and prose is not always clear.