Canterbury Tales, The

American  

noun

1. an uncompleted sequence of tales by Chaucer, written for the most part after 1387.

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The Canterbury Tales Cultural  

1. A work written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century about a group of pilgrims, of many different occupations and personalities, who meet at an inn near London as they are setting out for Canterbury, England. Their host proposes a storytelling contest to make the journey more interesting.

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The tales, which are almost all in rhyme, have many different styles, reflecting the great diversity of the pilgrims; some are notoriously bawdy. The language of The Canterbury Tales is Middle English.

Some of the more famous stories are “The Knight's Tale,” “The Miller's Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath's Tale.”

Example Sentences

Unfortunately, this rather unforgiving threshold would dismiss as harrumphing blather the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address, “A Tale of Two Cities,” “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “The Canterbury Tales,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Don Quixote,” as well as, ahem, this very sentence .

From Washington Post

Moghadam is joking, as he and his co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory tend to do, but the goal to give the Canterbury Tales the Rap Genius treatment is a real one, and part of a move to take the annotation website beyond simply explaining rap lyrics and towards annotating every text in the world.

From The Guardian

The former is expansive and would include events like Peter Brook's The Mahabharata and the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby and The Canterbury Tales: the latter is distillatory and contains the work of Ibsen, Chekhov and Pinter.

From The Guardian

Thus old tales like The Thousand and One Nights, the fabliaux, The Canterbury Tales, the Grimms' folk stories have a magic rarely found in latter ages.

From Time Magazine Archive

He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners, and humours, as we now call them, of the whole English nation in his age.

From Project Gutenberg