Pronunciation Noun
fable (plural fables)
- A fictitious narrative intended to enforce some useful truth or precept, usually with animals, etc. as characters; an apologue. Prototypically, Aesop's Fables.
- Synonyms: morality play
- Any story told to excite wonder; common talk; the theme of talk.
- 1 Timothy 4:7,
- Old wives' fables.
- Synonyms: legend
- 1 Timothy 4:7,
- Fiction; untruth; falsehood.
- The plot, story, or connected series of events forming the subject of an epic or dramatic poem.
- Russian: небыли́ца
fable (fables, present participle fabling; past and past participle fabled)
- (intransitive, archaic) To compose fables; hence, to write or speak fiction; to write or utter what is not true.
- 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, Act IV, Scene 2,
- He fables not; I hear the enemy:
- Out, some light horsemen, and peruse their wings.
- 1706, Matthew Prior, “An Ode, Humbly Inscribed to the Queen,” stanza 17, in Samuel Johnson (editor), The Works of the English Poets, London, 1779, Volume 30, p. 254,
- Vain now the tales which fabling poets tell,
- That wavering Conquest still desires to rove!
- In Marlborough’s camp the goddess knows to dwell:
- Long as the hero’s life remains her love.
- 1852, Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, Act II, in Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, London: B. Fellowes, p. 50,
- He fables, yet speaks truth.
- 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, Act IV, Scene 2,
- (transitive, archaic) To make up; to devise, and speak of, as true or real; to tell of falsely; to recount in the form of a fable.
- 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI, lines 288-292,[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_(1674)/Book_VI]
- […] err not, that so shall end
- The strife which thou callest evil, but we style
- The strife of glory; which we mean to win,
- Or turn this Heaven itself into the Hell
- Thou fablest […]
- 1691, Arthur Gorges (translator), The Wisdom of the Ancients by Francis Bacon (1609), London, “Cassandra, or, Divination,”
- The Poets Fable, That Apollo being enamoured of Cassandra, was by her many shifts and cunning slights still deluded in his Desire […]
- 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter II,
- Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. […]
- Synonyms: make up, invent, feign, devise
- 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI, lines 288-292,[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_(1674)/Book_VI]
- German: fabulieren
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.049
