Word.ws English Dictionary

apologue

/ˈæpəlɒɡ/

apologue noun: a short story with a moral, often involving talking animals or objects; a fable.

Noun

apologue (countable and uncountable, plural apologues)

  1. A short story with a moral, often involving talking animals or objects; a fable.
    • "Still I must bear my hard lot as well as I can—at least, I shall be amongst gentlefolks, and not with vulgar city people": and she fell to thinking of her Russell Square friends with that very same philosophical bitterness with which, in a certain apologue, the fox is represented as speaking of...1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 7, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC
    • […] but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader's mind.1891, Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, page 409
  2. (rhetoric) The use of fable to persuade the audience.

Forms of apologue

pluralapologues

Origin of apologue

Borrowed from French apologue, from Latin apologus from Ancient Greek ἀπόλογος (apólogos, “story, tale, fable”) from ἀπό- (apó-, “off, away from”) + λόγος (lógos, “speech”). Equivalent to apo- + -logue.

Words formed from apologue

Questions about apologue

What does apologue mean?
Apologue means a short story with a moral, often involving talking animals or objects; a fable.
What part of speech is apologue?
Apologue is a noun.
How do you pronounce apologue?
Apologue is pronounced /ˈæpəlɒɡ/.
What is the plural of apologue?
The plural of apologue is apologues.

Words near apologue in the dictionary

  1. apologizes
  2. apologizin'
  3. apologizing
  4. apologizingly
  5. apologizings
  6. apologue
  7. apologues
  8. apology
  9. Apolonia
  10. Apolonio
  11. Apolonio Samson

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: apologue (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-apologue.wav.

Cite this entry: “apologue.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/apologue. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.