tall tale

English

Etymology

From tall (“exaggerated”) +‎ tale.[1][2]

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /tɔːl ˈteɪl/
  • (General American) IPA(key): /tɔl ˈteɪl/
  • Audio (General Australian):(file)
  • Rhymes: -eɪl

Noun

tall tale (plural tall tales)

  1. (idiomatic) A tale or story which is fantastic and greatly exaggerated; also, an account of questionable veracity; a lie, an untruth.
    Synonyms: Banbury story of a cock and a bull, cock-and-bull story, fish story, tall story, traveller's tale
    He returned on Monday with a tall tale about a 100-pound fish he had caught.
    • 2020 August 4, Richard Conniff, “They may look goofy, but ostriches are nobody’s fool”, in National Geographic Magazine‎[1]:
      The head-in-sand idea is a threadbare, 2,000-year-old hand-me-down from the Roman naturalist Pliny, who sometimes passed on tall tales.

Translations

tale or story which is fantastic and greatly exaggerated

See also

References

  1. ^ Compare “tall, adj. (and n.)”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, July 2023.
  2. ^ “tall tale, n.”, in Collins English Dictionary; from Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary, 6th edition, Boston, Mass.: Heinle Cengage Learning; Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009, →ISBN.

Further reading

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.