- a tendency to face facts and be practical rather than imaginative or visionary
- the picturing in art and literature of people and things as they really appear to be, without idealizing
- Philos.
- the doctrine that universal or abstract terms are objectively actual
- the doctrine that material objects exist in themselves, apart from the mind's consciousness of them
Origin of realism
from German realismus from Modern Latin from Medieval Latin realis, real + -ismus, -ism