Prose
The word "prose" first appears in English in the 14th century. It is derived from the Old French "prose", which in turn originates in the Latin expression "prosa oratio" (literally, straightforward or direct speech).
History of literature
The two primary streams of Ottoman written literature are poetry and prose. Of the two, divan poetry was by far the dominant stream. Moreover, it should be noted that, until the 19th century, Ottoman prose did not contain any examples of fiction; that is, there were no counterparts to, for instance, the European romance, short story, or novel (though analogous genres did, to some extent, exist in both the Turkish folk tradition and in divan poetry). Until the 19th century, Ottoman prose never managed to develop to the extent that contemporary divan poetry did. A large part of the reason for this was that much prose was expected to adhere to the rules of "sec"' (سجع, also transliterated as "seci"), or rhymed prose, a type of writing descended from the Arabic "saj'" and which prescribed that between each adjective and noun in a sentence, there must be a rhyme.