Folklore

thumb|A German folk tale, Hansel and Gretel; illustration by [[Arthur Rackham, 1909]] Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. This also includes material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also encompasses customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, including folk religion, and the forms and rituals of celebrations such as festivals, weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites.

thumb|In this Lady Godiva (painting)|1897 painting of [[Lady Godiva by John Collier, the authentic historical person is fully submerged in the legend, presented in an anachronistic high medieval setting.]]

fictional story typically featuring folkloric fantasy characters and magic

thumb|200px|Anthropomorphism|Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphised, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.

Onomastics (or onomatology in older texts) is the study of proper names, including their etymology, history, and use.

set of widely accepted beliefs

informal understanding of acceptable conduct

thumb|The Return of the Prodigal Son (Rembrandt)|The Return of the Prodigal Son, by [[Rembrandt, 1660s]]

form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another

curse believed to be cast by a malevolent glare, causing many cultures to create measures against it

An anecdote is "a story with a point", such as to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative or to characterize by delineating a specific quirk or trait.

thumb|upright=0.9|Grotesque studies, Michelangelo. Grotesque is an adjective often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes an audience feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.

branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore

urban legend about the existence of a game on the Russophonic internet that allegedly incites teenagers to commit suicide

thumb|upright=1.35|The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir [[John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1870.A seafarer tells the young Walter Raleigh and his brother the story of what happened out at sea.]]

REDIRECT Cant (language)#Argot

Process of reinterpretive word formation

Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken form of a language or dialect, particularly when perceived as having lower social status or less prestige than standard language, which is more codified, institutionally promoted, literary, or formal. More narrowly, any particular variety of a natural language that does not hold a widespread high-status perception, and sometimes even carries social stigma, is also called a vernacular, vernacular dialect, nonstandard dialect, etc. and is typically its speakers' native variety. Regardless of any such stigma, all nonstandard dialects are full-fledged v

type of magic intended to turn away harm or evil influences

Fon all-female military regiment of the historical Kingdom of Dahomey

category of architecture based on local needs, construction materials and reflecting local traditions

A backronym treats an already existing word as an acronym and expands its letters into the words of a phrase, and so is effectively an acrostic. The word is a portmanteau of back and acronym. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology.

motif of a vagina with teeth, esp. in folk tales and myths

thumb|300px|right|A 19th-century children's book informs its readers that the Dutch people|Dutch were a "very industrious race", and that Chinese children were "very obedient to their parents".

thumb|Eternal Flame Falls in New York has an eternal flame inside a small grotto behind the falls thumb|Grutas de García in [[Nuevo León, Mexico]]

right|thumb|upright=1.3|Bullroarers from Africa in the Pitt Rivers Museum

parable from the ancient Indian subcontinent, in which several blind men feel and try to conceptualize an elephant

character archetype

genre of fiction featuring supernatural elements

two kinds of linguistic field research

thumb|200px|A sample generic Mărțișor Mărțișor () is a tradition celebrated at the beginning of Spring in March, involving an object made from two intertwined red and white strings with hanging tassel. It is practiced in Romania and Moldova, and very similar to Martenitsa tradition in Bulgaria, Martinka in North Macedonia and traditions of other populations from Southeastern Europe.

mythical or fictional plant or tree that eats people

flint arrowheads and axes, turned up by farmer's plows, considered to have fallen from the sky and worshiped as gods

telling of a story to somebody about to sleep

phrase used on maps to indicate uncharted areas

fable by Aesop

idiom

archetypal figure

'''Gargee'an (), sometimes spelled as Gerga'oon''' (Arabic: قرقاعون), is a semiannual celebration, observed primarily in Eastern Arabia. It takes place on the 13th, 14th or 15th night of the Islamic month of Ramadan. It is celebrated by children and adults alike dressing in traditional attire and going door-to-door to receive sweets and nuts from neighbours, as they sing traditional songs. This traditional holiday is celebrated by both Sunni and Shia. The tradition has existed for hundreds of years, and is deeply rooted in some parts of the Persian Gulf culture, especially in (Qatif and Al-Ahs

medieval tale of a woman making a fool of an aged philosopher

Memory of the World inscription, submitted by Latvia, added in 2001

thumb|Syrian children playing in a New York City street

non-human animal that can produce sounds or gestures resembling those of a human language

Decorative heart knot on male folk costume in Podhale region, Poland

folklore trope

popularly held but false belief about the origin or derivation of a specific word

A sin-eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal in order to spiritually take on the sins of a deceased person. The food was believed to absorb the sins of a recently dead person, thus absolving the soul of the person.

thumb|Collection of a Toadstone, illustrated in Hortus Sanitatis, published in [[Mainz in 1491.]] thumb|Lower jaw fragment of Scheenstia, showing the teeth in situ The toadstone, also known as bufonite (from Latin , "toad") and crapaud-stone, is a mythical stone or gem that was thought to be found in the head of a toad. It was supposed to be an antidote to poison and in this it is like batrachite, supposedly formed in the heads of frogs. Toadstones were actually the button-like fossilised teeth of Scheenstia (previously Lepidotes), an extinct genus of ray-finned fish from the Jurassic and Cret

German philologist and germanist (1834–1891)

hypothesis that fish and other animals move according to the location of the moon in comparison to their bodies

Pseudo-mythology ( or kabinetnaya mifologiya, "office mythology", literally "cabinet mythology") are myths and deities which are not properly attested in traditional mythology and folklore or their existence is doubtful or disproved. It may be created by researchers who liberally interpret scarce sources.

intentionally-long joke ending in an anticlimax

form of storytelling with similarly structured episodes and frequently repeated linguistic formulas

subgenre of horror fiction

Museum in Hiroshima prefecture, Japan

notion of a conception by miraculous circumstances in several religions and mythologies

Bantu drum

Ethiopian and Eritrean folklore

oakwood on Dartmoor, Devon, England

counter-magical item used as protection against witchcraft