folklore means the tales, legends, superstitions, and traditions of a particular ethnic population. It carries an Arena rating of 1560, earned across 2 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, folklore ranks #786 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #886 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #5,410 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say, #5,544 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words.
folklore is pronounced /ˈfəʊk.lɔː/.
Why “folklore” is a great word
The traditional beliefs, legends, customs, and oral traditions of a particular community, passed informally from one generation to the next. From folk (meaning "people, community") + lore (meaning "learning, traditional knowledge"), coined in 1846 by the British writer William Thoms. Unlike "mythology," which denotes a formal, sacred canon concerning gods and creation, or "history," which demands documentation and verifiable evidence, folklore is the ungoverned, living accumulation of a people's unofficial memory. It is the warning embedded in a local ghost story, the recipe chanted in a kitchen rhyme, and the peculiar ritual performed at a village boundary stone—practices sustained not by institutions but by the sheer stubbornness of transmission, the past remembered in the body's instinct to lean closer and listen.
Etymology
From folk + lore, coined by British writer William Thoms in 1846 to replace terms such as "popular antiquities". Thoms imitated German terms such as Volklehre (“people's customs”) and Volksüberlieferung (“popular tradition”). Compare also Old English folclar (“popular instruction; homily”) and West Frisian folkloare (“folklore”).
noun
- The tales, legends, superstitions, and traditions of a particular ethnic population.
- The tales, superstitions etc. of any particular group or community.e.g.“A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in Appendix A, Hacker Folklore.” — 1996, Eric S. Raymond, The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd edition, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 3:
- The collective of proofs or techniques which are widely known among mathematicians, but have never been formally published.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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