How to Use folktale in a Sentence

folktale

noun
  • West African folktales that continue to be passed from generation to generation through storytelling.
  • Bigfoot is not merely a folktale but a way of life in these areas.
    — Haadiza Ogwude, The Enquirer, 6 Aug. 2022
  • That fact is, by folktale and firm record, key to the Juneteenth story.
    — Janell Ross, Time, 16 June 2021
  • The movie opens like an old folktale, and that tone pervades the rest of the narrative.
    — Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 Feb. 2025
  • African art adorned our walls and Black folktales flowed through our ears at the dinner table.
    — Melanie Curry, refinery29.com, 1 Feb. 2024
  • The folktale is one of the first stories Chinese children learn about in school.
    — Michelle Tchea, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 June 2024
  • Skarsgard first read the script for Eggers’ macabre folktale 10 years ago.
    — Lily Ford, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Dec. 2024
  • The image seemed to illustrate a folktale just out of the reach of memory.
    — Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 2021
  • 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
  • It's inspired by Scottish folktales and feels like a modern classic.
    — USA TODAY, 28 June 2023
  • 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
  • In one activity, a mentor tells an African folktale to a student.
    — Erika Page, The Christian Science Monitor, 23 Feb. 2022
  • 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
  • This ecology is woven into our folktales and culture.
    — Noo Saro-Wiwa, The Dial, 24 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • The piece looks at birth, transformation, and death through an Azerbaijani folktale.
    — Peter Dobrin, Philly.com, 6 June 2018
  • Over a 40-year span, seven editions of the folktale collection were published.
    — National Geographic, 24 Sep. 2019
  • Winfrey has gone way past Walker’s sisterhood folktale of Celie.
    — Armond White, National Review, 3 Jan. 2024
  • Hovering blue flames that flicker over bogs and marshes have inspired ghostly folktales for centuries.
    — Mindy Weisberger, CNN Money, 8 Oct. 2025
  • Still, the folktale remained part of European culture, coming in and out of the zeitgeist.
    — Roy Schwartz, CNN, 21 Dec. 2021
  • Everyone in the studio nods along to Paco’s tough-minded flexes and mafioso folktales.
    — Alphonse Pierre, Pitchfork, 11 Apr. 2025
  • Later, the look became incorporated in folktales as the attire of grim reapers.
    — Claire Wang, NBC news, 12 Oct. 2025
  • Those folktales reflect how Mo is feeling and what's going on in his life and alleviate his sadness or grief or anger.
    — Malaka Gharib, NPR, 21 Mar. 2025
  • According to the scholar Maria Tatar, these were folktales shared among adults after hours, while the children were asleep.
    — Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker, 4 Nov. 2024
  • In African culture, there is a long tradition of teaching through folktales that have animals at the center.
    — Eben Shapiro, Time, 17 May 2018
  • 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
  • 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
  • Silvia is entranced by the stories of her aunt Ena, who offers folktales of her home and their past, one that her mother has kept swathed in secrecy.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 19 Mar. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'folktale.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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