fabliau
noun
fabliau is a noun meaning “A short, farcical, often bawdy tale of a genre written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-A-B-L-I-A-U, and it appears about once in every 89 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of fabliau is fabliaux.
What does fabliau mean?
noun
- 1
A short, farcical, often bawdy tale of a genre written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of fabliau
- fabliaux plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is fabliau?
Fabliau appears about once in every 89 million words in written English, the 301,415th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Fabliau in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense short farcical tale:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does fabliau come from?
Learned borrowing from Old French fabliau, diminutive of fable.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).