Meaning & use
Fabliau
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A short, comic, often bawdy narrative poem popular in medieval French literature, frequently satirizing everyday life.
See it in a sentence
Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" borrows heavily from the tradition of the fabliau.
Scholars study the fabliau as an early form of realistic, humorous storytelling.
A note on using this word
A French loanword still used in its original plural form "fabliaux" in academic writing about medieval literature.
Words with a similar meaning
talecomic verse
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