means A novel is a long fictional prose narrative, typically book-length, that invents characters and events to tell a sustained story; as an adjective it means new, fresh, or never seen before.

from Both senses trace back to Latin 'novus,' meaning new — the same root behind 'novelty' and 'innovate.' The book-sense took a scenic route: Italians called a fresh little tale a 'novella' (literally 'a new thing'), the form Boccaccio made famous, and English borrowed it as 'novel' to mean a piece of fiction that was, at the time, genuinely a new kind of story. The plain adjective 'novel' = 'new' came through the same Latin door, often via Old French 'novel.' So a novel is, at heart, news that never happened.