Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
a. As happens in real life; not fictional.
Usage examples of "real-life".
Still, if a certain amount of healthy, visually stimulated autoeroticism was okay, I also knew it would hurt her terribly if I ever had a real-life affair.
Confronted with his real-life son and daughter, Burgo Smyth looked not so much fatherly as grimly angry.
The audience got to see real-life footage of cops pulling their guns, busting down crack-house doors, handcuffing squirming suspects and seizing relatively minuscule amounts of dope.
But the three movies that mirrored the real-life events were from a place called Cabbagehead Productions in Seattle.
His real-life wife, the well-known Pallas Ril, is lost somewhere within the city.
Although they could seemingly learn - that is, change their output properties in response to different inputs, so as, for example, to recognize and classify simple patterns - they failed at anything that was much more complex or even remotely resembled real-life problems.
In spite of all the overheated excitement generated by fictional psychic vampire talents, real-life prisms were quite safe.
And yet, within the artificial world that the laboratory enables one to create, we can and must isolate the variables, and, if we are clever and lucky enough, we can discover how to fit them back into some meaningful real-life pattern.
After a short stroll in the park and an early movierated R for raunchy, some godawful rendition of a worse bestseller, that bound itself somehow in Dan's mind with his real-life situation, so that he kept half-expecting the crab-machine to appear on screenhe bought Wanda burgers and beer at one of the classier drive-ins, after which they moved on to what the newspapers called a swinging singles bar.
For four hundred and thirty winters, Antares had been the real-life version of the red stars with which Altan children decorated theirfala bushes at Christmastime, an ochre beacon hoveringlow over the Colgate Mountain Rangeeach eveningafter sunset.
There were the usual types of real-life weirdos -- clippies and stickies and nudies and people walking about shrouded in opaque anonymity chadors -- but all of this was secondary.
As a result of their "hostess" efforts, both the real-life Atwater and "Betty Crocker" caused sales to boom in their respective industries.
Most of the studies I'd read had suggested that the earlier a child took up VR (headset-and-glove, of course, not implant-based), the fewer side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body image.
It was as if a fantastic illustration were coming to life, and she was the only real-life character left in the story, a contemporary Alice with designer jeans and turquoise earrings, who had been set to wander through a golden fairytale.
The results in the book are exact opposites of those since achieved in real-life American state penitentiaries with real-life electric chairs.