Definition of "folklore" []

• The traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of a people, transmitted orally. (noun)
• The comparative study of folk knowledge and culture. Also called folkloristics. (noun)
• A body of widely accepted but usually specious notions about a place, a group, or an institution: Rumors of their antics became part of the folklore of Hollywood. (noun)
• A popular but unfounded belief. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The present author reserves the term folklore for application to those unappropriated scraps of popular song, story, myth, and superstition that have drifted down the stream of antiquity and that reach us in the scrap-bag of popular memory, often bearing in their battered forms the evidence of long use."
• "On the same principle, why should they not apply the term folklore to the myths and stories that make up the body of"
• "This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull."