Word.ws English Dictionary

fabliau

fabliau noun: a short, farcical, often bawdy tale of a genre written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.

Noun

fabliau (plural fabliaux)

  1. A short, farcical, often bawdy tale of a genre written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.
    • ‘I’m planning a sort of fabliau comparing this place with a fascist state,’ said Sampson, ‘sort of Animal Farm meets Arturo Ui . . .’1991 September, Stephen Fry, chapter 1, in The Liar, London: Heinemann, →ISBN, section I, page 19

Forms of fabliau

pluralfabliaux

Origin of fabliau

Learned borrowing from Old French fabliau, diminutive of fable.

Questions about fabliau

What does fabliau mean?
Fabliau means a short, farcical, often bawdy tale of a genre written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.
What part of speech is fabliau?
Fabliau is a noun.
What is the plural of fabliau?
The plural of fabliau is fabliaux.

Words near fabliau in the dictionary

  1. fablemongers
  2. fabler
  3. fablers
  4. fables
  5. fabless
  6. fabliau
  7. fabliaux
  8. fabling
  9. fablings
  10. fablist
  11. fablists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fabliau (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.

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