apologue

Borrowed from French apologue, from Latin apologus from Ancient Greek ἀπόλογος (apólogos, “story, tale, fable”) from ἀπό- (apó-, “off, away from”) + λόγος (lógos, “speech”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈæpəlɒɡ/

apologue (countable and uncountable, plural apologues)

1. A short story with a moral, often involving talking animals or objects; a fable.
   • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 7, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC:

     "Still I must bear my hard lot as well as I can—at least, I shall be amongst gentlefolks, and not with vulgar city people": and she fell to thinking of her Russell Square friends with that very same philosophical bitterness with which, in a certain apologue, the fox is represented as speaking of the grapes.

   • 1891, Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, page 409:

     […] but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader's mind.

2. (rhetoric) The use of fable to persuade the audience.

• apologetic
• apology

From Latin apologus, from Ancient Greek ἀπόλογος (apólogos).

apologue m (plural apologues)

1. apologue

• “apologue”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.