A chapter is one of the main sections that divides a book, like the way a year is divided into months or a soccer game into halves. Most novels have somewhere between 10 and 40 chapters, each focusing on a particular scene, event, or part of the story. When you finish a chapter and see that Roman numeral or number at the start of the next page, you know you're beginning a new section.

Chapter breaks give readers natural stopping points. You might tell your parents “just one more chapter” before bedtime, knowing it's a manageable chunk of reading. Authors use chapters strategically: they might end one with a cliffhanger that makes you desperately want to keep reading, or begin a new chapter to show that time has passed or the scene has shifted to a different place.

The word also describes a distinct period or phase in someone's life. When your family moves to a new city, you might think of it as starting a new chapter. A difficult experience that's finally over might be called a closed chapter. These uses capture how chapters mark beginnings and endings, just like in books. When something represents a dark chapter in history, it means a particularly troubled period that people remember as a distinct, difficult time.