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).
Novel
The present English (and Spanish) word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian "novella" for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin "novella", a singular noun use of the neuter plural of "novellus", diminutive of "novus", meaning "new". Most European languages use the word "romance" (as in French, Dutch, Russian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; Finnish "romaani"; German "Roman"; Portuguese "romance" and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.
Fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period authors of historical narratives would often include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would also invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political and personal realities of a place and period with clarity and detail not found in works of history.
While prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of the modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France, especially those by Chrétien de Troyes (late 12th century), and in Middle English (Geoffrey Chaucer's (c. 1343 – 1400) "The Canterbury Tales"). Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byron's "Don Juan" (1824), Alexander Pushkin's "Yevgeniy Onegin" (1833), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh" (1856), competed with prose novels. Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate" (1986), composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel.
Both in 12th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations. On the other hand, verse epics, including the "Odyssey" and "Aeneid", had been recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters. A new world of individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct", and "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance.
The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella. However, in the 17th century, critics saw the romance as of epic length and the novel as its short rival. A precise definition of the differences in length between these types of fiction, is, however, not possible.The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that a novel should encompass the "totality of life."