folklore
folklore
English
“Surprisingly, folklore is a Victorian coinage.”
Folklore is younger than it sounds. The word was coined in London in 1846 by William Thoms in a letter to The Athenaeum. He proposed it as a plain English replacement for "popular antiquities." From its first appearance, it named the customs, tales, sayings, and beliefs carried by ordinary people.
Thoms built the new term from two older English words. Folk came through Old English folc, meaning people or common people. Lore came through Old English lar, meaning learning or teaching. The compound made an old field of study sound native and compact.
The word spread quickly through nineteenth-century antiquarian writing. By the later 1800s, folklore named both the material itself and the study of that material. Collectors used it for ballads, seasonal rites, charms, proverbs, and oral tales. Universities and learned societies later narrowed and systematized the term, but the popular sense remained broad.
Today folklore is still double in meaning. It is the body of inherited tradition, and it is the discipline that records and interprets that tradition. The word has also widened into everyday speech for ideas repeated until they feel ancestral. What began in 1846 as a neat editorial fix became a standard name for living tradition.
Related Words
Today
Folklore now means the stories, beliefs, sayings, customs, and rituals passed through a community, often by word of mouth or repeated practice. It can name a village tale, a holiday custom, a superstition, or the whole inherited body of tradition around a people or place.
In modern use it also means ideas repeated so often that they harden into communal knowledge, whether or not they are true. In academic work, folklore is the study of such transmission across generations and groups. "What people keep saying."
Explore more words