How to Use oral tradition in a Sentence

oral tradition

noun
  • This is so much from oral tradition told to me again by elders.
    — Literary Hub, 16 June 2026
  • She is revered in those regions, and oral tradition keeps her myths alive.
    — Literary Hub, 6 Jan. 2026
  • That started my intense study of jazz via the oral tradition.
    — Lisa Deaderick, San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 May 2023
  • Where books were banned and statues smashed, songs endured through oral tradition.
    — Hannah Allam, Washington Post, 27 Dec. 2023
  • Culling from a grand oral tradition of dad jokes is a tradition as old as dads themselves.
    — Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 8 Dec. 2023
  • Their lives and deaths are shared through vivid storytelling based on years of archival research and stories passed down in the oral tradition.
    — Jaha Nailah Avery, Condé Nast Traveler, 20 June 2024
  • This discovery is quite rare, in part because such comedic acts were usually passed down through oral tradition.
    — Christopher Parker, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 June 2023
  • An ancient precursor to the kamikaze pilot and the suicide bomber, passed down through oral tradition.
    — Andrew Cockburn, Harper's Magazine, 22 Aug. 2024
  • Stevens’ mother learned her trade the same way, as did her mother’s mother and so on, going back centuries, through oral tradition.
    — Alex Higgins, Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug. 2023
  • One of the trickster figures in oral tradition with Osage is Coyote.
    — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, 4 Feb. 2024
  • This only heightens the sense of an oral tradition, of errors and ellipses, of tales that have been rolled over and smoothed out over the years, like the workings of time on a stone.
    — Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 30 Mar. 2023
  • According to oral tradition passed down among the island's people, the heavy statues walked themselves, Hunt said.
    — Saleen Martin, USA TODAY, 2 Mar. 2023
  • In an oral tradition, Gladstone emphasizes, there’s no one way of seeing things; each person’s narrative is the truth.
    — Selome Hailu, Variety, 16 Nov. 2023
  • Homer was not one person, it is now generally agreed, but a slowly accumulating oral tradition given a name.
    — Claudia Roth Pierpont, New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2025
  • The oral tradition is something that is really important to preserve, and young people recognize this.
    — The Dial, 19 Nov. 2024
  • There is a long oral tradition about volcanism at Meager as far back as eruptions that happened ~2,360 years ago.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 2 May 2024
  • For me, memory is one of the great organizing principles of storytelling, often even more than the oral tradition.
    — Willing Davidson, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2023
  • Folklore, defined broadly, is an oral tradition that stretches across generations.
    — Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times, 16 Dec. 2023
  • According to their oral tradition, the villages of Tsegi Canyon were abandoned as part of a spiritual quest.
    — Roger Naylor, The Arizona Republic, 7 Aug. 2024
  • Classic games like Clue are often taught through oral tradition and that distorts how the game is played because people misremember the rules or were taught versions with house rules.
    — Rob Wieland, Forbes, 31 Oct. 2024
  • This history is complicated by an oral tradition that a hodgepodge of pipes in the city were installed before 1883.
    — Kevin Dayhoff, Baltimore Sun, 9 Sep. 2023
  • Archaeology and oral tradition often focus on opposite ends of the human story.
    — science.org, 3 July 2024
  • Most children learn this lesson early (or used to), passed down through oral tradition and eventually repackaged as Saturday morning cartoons.
    — Stephen Wakeling, Forbes.com, 20 Jan. 2026
  • One oral tradition about Lake Nyos describes how people long ago attempted to cross the dry lake bed between the high, contorted rock formations of the maar’s volcanic rim.
    — Literary Hub, 22 Oct. 2025
  • My father-in-law, a Harvard professor, of pure Irish extraction, had a prodigious memory and was heir to the Celtic oral tradition.
    — Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 20 Dec. 2024
  • Holmes also recounts the oral tradition of his family that his ancestor Budginbro would swim with Old Tom and the other orcas in the pod.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 9 Nov. 2023
  • But there’s a story in Hawaiian oral tradition about the Native Hawaiian goddess Pele, who rules over the volcanoes of the islands.
    — Sara Kehaulani Goo, The Atlantic, 6 June 2025
  • During that time, accounts of daring Viking voyages, love, war, betrayal, and heroism – featuring a pantheon of gods, trolls, giants, dwarfs, and humans – were all part of a rich oral tradition.
    — Kristina Lindborg, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 May 2024
  • Following their assimilation from the oral tradition into cheerleaders of literacy, the muses are seen waving pens and quills, scrolls and manuscripts in ancient artworks.
    — Alison Habens, JSTOR Daily, 31 Oct. 2024
  • Inevitably, homiletics has found itself at the crossroads between a print tradition concerned with possessive authorship and an oral tradition concerned with charisma and communion.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 22 Mar. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oral tradition.' 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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