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fabled

adjectiveC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,880 of 15,258neutral

Fabled means famous in stories, and perhaps not quite real. The fabled city, a fabled treasure, fabled beasts.

The doubt is the useful part: calling something fabled says it is famous and quietly declines to say it exists — which is why explorers' accounts and travel writing reach for it. Of something real it means legendary. Note fable, from the Latin for a story.

Definitions of fabled

  1. 1adjectivefabledFamous in stories, and perhaps not quite real.C2

    “Explorers searched for the fabled city of gold for centuries but never found it.”

fabled is a quality of legend.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *bʰeh₂-

  2. Latin

    fābula

  3. Old French

    fable

  4. English

    fable

  5. English, today

    fabled

Built from

  • for · Latin — to speak, say
  • -bula · Latin — instrumental suffix

fable comes from Middle English -, borrowed from Old French fable, from Latin fābula, from for (“to speak, say”) + -bula (“instrumental suffix”). See ban, and compare fabulous, fame. a doublet of fabula.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

fabled in the wild

  • Darwin French is credited as applying the term Panamint in 1860 during his search for the fabled Gunsight Lode.

    Panamint Range

  • The park named after the fabled simian kingdom in the epic Ramayana.

    Kishkinta

  • Jarl Sigvaldi was the semi-legendary chieftain of the fabled Jomsvikings and commander of their stronghold - Jomsborg.

    Sigvaldi Strut-Haraldsson

  • Set in the fictional Hyborian Age, it concerns Conan infiltrating a perilous tower to steal a fabled gem from an evil sorcerer named Yara.

    The Tower of the Elephant

  • Unlike most adaptations, the cartoon features a fabled version of the story.

    Cinderella Blues

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the fable family

fabledfable

fabled — used about once every 7,462 pages · #10,880 · point at the bar for the others