Traditional stories

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.

thumbnail|upright=1.25|Boris Yeltsin and [[Bill Clinton enjoying a joke]] A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:

symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it

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

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.

type of prose and verse narrative

18th century samurai battle

genre of fiction featuring supernatural elements

thumb|A common factoid is the incorrect claim that the Great Wall of China is visible from space with the naked eye. A factoid was originally defined to mean a false statement presented as a fact. In colloquial speech, it is often used to mean a true but brief or trivial item of news or information (which can be less ambiguously described as a "factlet").

An apologue or apolog (from the Greek ἀπόλογος, a "statement" or "account") is a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly. Unlike a fable, the moral is more important than the narrative details. As with the parable, the apologue is a tool of rhetorical argument used to convince or persuade.

fairytales opening lines

story known throughout the Indian sub-continent

is the title given to fictionalized accounts in Japanese literature, theater, and film that relate to the historical incident involving the forty-seven rōnin and their mission to avenge the death of their master, Asano Naganori. Including the early , the story has been told in kabuki, bunraku, stage plays, films, novels, television shows and other media. With ten different television productions in the years 1997–2007 alone, Chūshingura ranks among the most familiar of all historical stories in Japan.

stories about traditions, like legends, folk tales, myths, fairy tales

Persian fairy tale

principles for understanding folktales