How to Use folktale in a Sentence

folktale

noun

• West African folktales that continue to be passed from generation to generation through storytelling.
• That fact is, by folktale and firm record, key to the Juneteenth story.
  — Janell Ross, Time, 16 June 2021
• The Grimms had not intended to publish a book of folktales.
  — National Geographic, 24 Sep. 2019
• Bigfoot is not merely a folktale but a way of life in these areas.
  — Haadiza Ogwude, The Enquirer, 6 Aug. 2022
• The image seemed to illustrate a folktale just out of the reach of memory.
  — Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 2021
• In the folktale, a powerful black steel-driving man named John Henry challenges the steam drill to a race, beats it, and dies.
  — Tom Maxwell, Longreads, 5 Oct. 2017
• Like the soup in the folktale, this recipe can be made with whatever bounty of vegetables comes your way.
  — Ben Fogel, Sunset Magazine, 16 Feb. 2024
• The origin story of Knuckleheads reads kind of like a folktale.
  — Aaron Rhodes, Rolling Stone, 9 June 2021
• Still, the folktale remained part of European culture, coming in and out of the zeitgeist.
  — Roy Schwartz, CNN, 21 Dec. 2021
• This is the austere premise of the game, based on a folktale involving the 12th-century German king Barbarossa.
  — Lewis Gordon, Wired, 15 Dec. 2020
• Similar themes run through the myths and folktales of hunter-gatherer societies around the world.
  — Ferris Jabr, Harper's magazine, 10 Mar. 2019
• In our storytelling structure — look at our folktales and the way my grandma would tell it — one little story can take hours to tell.
  — Thinus Ferreira, Variety, 28 Feb. 2024
• Season of the Witch is a weird ’80s gem, a mix of folktale and high-tech horror about a company selling haunted children’s masks.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 8 Sep. 2021
• The game, which was meant to depict the evil of such owners, spread like a folktale, adopted by communities who tweaked the rules to suit their tastes and circumstances.
  — Simon Parkin, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023
• In a Cambodian children’s folktale, one man is afraid of lawyers and another is afraid of filth.
  — Allyssa McCabe, The Conversation, 26 June 2023
• It's inspired by Scottish folktales and feels like a modern classic.
  — USA TODAY, 28 June 2023
• Over a 40-year span, seven editions of the folktale collection were published.
  — National Geographic, 24 Sep. 2019
• Just like the faeries of ancient folktale, the inhabitants pay an annual toll of sacrifice, and no one must speak of it.
  — Tom Shippey, WSJ, 10 Dec. 2020
• Perhaps these wounds might even compel a young woman to retreat into folktales, to rewrite odes of the distant past.
  — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 30 Dec. 2019
• In one activity, a mentor tells an African folktale to a student.
  — Erika Page, The Christian Science Monitor, 23 Feb. 2022
• Typing: People with and without Parkinson's were asked to listen to a folktale and transcribe it by typing.
  — Anne Pycha, Scientific American, 29 May 2017
• Typing: People with and without Parkinson's were asked to listen to a folktale and transcribe it by typing.
  — Anne Pycha, Scientific American, 1 June 2017
• The piece looks at birth, transformation, and death through an Azerbaijani folktale.
  — Peter Dobrin, Philly.com, 6 June 2018
• In African culture, there is a long tradition of teaching through folktales that have animals at the center.
  — Eben Shapiro, Time, 17 May 2018
• The order of the animals in the Chinese zodiac comes from an ancient folktale with many variations and myths.
  — Frances Lee, Woman's Day, 19 Jan. 2023
• Like most myths, legends, and folktales, the story of El Cuco is a really, really old one.
  — Gina Vaynshteyn, refinery29.com, 12 Jan. 2020
• Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor has never been so silly as in this slapstick variation of the folktale about a bow-bearing noble bandit.
  — Sarah Pfledderer, Pacific San Diego Magazine, 28 June 2017
• There’s an old-fashioned, defanged feel to the stories, as if estrangement had been collared and corralled into the safe confines of a folktale.
  — Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 19 May 2010
• This kind of problem also plagues the mise-en-scene of this mostly soberly told folktale of sorts, which somehow contains some shots that are more surreal.
  — Boyd Van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter, 31 Aug. 2019
• Then there’s the 18th-century Irish folktale of Stingy Jack, an unsavory fellow often said to be a blacksmith who had a fondness for mischief and booze.
  — National Geographic, 27 Oct. 2020

Last Updated: 27 Jun 2024