How Old Is The Word Novel?

The word comes from the Italian "novella" or piece of news, and began to be used in the fourteenth century for story collections like Boccaccio's "Decameron." The basic form of the novel – a single long, prose story – is much older than that. Examples of long prose fiction can be found in Ancient Greece and Rome, like Apuleius's "The Golden Ass" from the second century AD.
However, when we talk about the novel today, we tend to mean the kind of sustained narrative, with a complex plot and developed characters, that in English literature did not really appear until the eighteenth century, although its forerunners, such as Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote, a Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare, can be found in other languages.
The best-known examples of the early English novel, like "Robinson Crusoe, "Moll Flanders" and "Gulliver's Travels" are all written in the first person, so that for the first time the character's thoughts and feelings become as, or more important than his or her actions; and although the novel has changed enormously since then, this concentration on the inner life of the characters has remained typical of the form.

15th century.