Tale may refer to:
- Cautionary tale, a traditional story told in folklore, to warn its hearer of a danger
- Fairy tale, a fictional story that usually features folkloric characters (such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, witches, giants, and talking animals) and enchantments
- Folk tale, a story passed-down within a particular population, which comprises the traditions of that culture or group.
- Fable, a brief story, which illustrates a moral lesson and which features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphised
- Frame tale, whereby the main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of organizing a set of shorter stories.
- Urban legend, a modern folk tale consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them
- Old wives' tale, a wisdom much like an urban legend, supposedly passed down by old wives to a younger generation
- Tall tale, a story that tries to explain the reason for some natural phenomenon
- TALE, or transcription activator-like effector, a type of DNA binding protein secreted by infectious bacteria of plants that contains a highly engineerable DNA binding domain
Famous quotes containing the word tale:
“—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“And what’s romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)