real-life

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real-life (comparative more real-life, superlative most real-life)

1. As happens in real life; not fictional or theoretical; actual as opposed to believed or assumed.

   He was a real-life detective before playing one in the movies.

   • 2013 June 29, “Travels and travails”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 55:

     Even without hovering drones, a lurking assassin, a thumping score and a denouement, the real-life story of Edward Snowden, a rogue spy on the run, could be straight out of the cinema. But, as with Hollywood, the subplots and exotic locations may distract from the real message: America’s discomfort and its foes’ glee.

   • 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 7:

     In addition, as far as we were aware, there were no published data that quantified real-life speech practices in Singapore beyond census reportage, but we had no reason to conclude a priori that the distribution of languages spoken at NIE would match census data.