How to Use oral tradition in a Sentence

oral tradition

noun
Definition of oral traditionnext
  • The rich oral tradition of West Africa takes the main stage.
    — Trinidad Barleycorn, Variety, 25 Apr. 2023
  • That started my intense study of jazz via the oral tradition.
    — Lisa Deaderick, San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 May 2023
  • Culling from a grand oral tradition of dad jokes is a tradition as old as dads themselves.
    — Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 8 Dec. 2023
  • This only heightens the sense of an oral tradition, of errors and ellipses, of tales that have been rolled over and smoothed out over the years, like the workings of time on a stone.
    — Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Where books were banned and statues smashed, songs endured through oral tradition.
    — Hannah Allam, Washington Post, 27 Dec. 2023
  • One of the trickster figures in oral tradition with Osage is Coyote.
    — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, 4 Feb. 2024
  • Stevens’ mother learned her trade the same way, as did her mother’s mother and so on, going back centuries, through oral tradition.
    — Alex Higgins, Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug. 2023
  • According to oral tradition passed down among the island's people, the heavy statues walked themselves, Hunt said.
    — Saleen Martin, USA TODAY, 2 Mar. 2023
  • There is a long oral tradition about volcanism at Meager as far back as eruptions that happened ~2,360 years ago.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 2 May 2024
  • This discovery is quite rare, in part because such comedic acts were usually passed down through oral tradition.
    — Christopher Parker, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 June 2023
  • In an oral tradition, Gladstone emphasizes, there’s no one way of seeing things; each person’s narrative is the truth.
    — Selome Hailu, Variety, 16 Nov. 2023
  • Holmes also recounts the oral tradition of his family that his ancestor Budginbro would swim with Old Tom and the other orcas in the pod.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 9 Nov. 2023
  • This history is complicated by an oral tradition that a hodgepodge of pipes in the city were installed before 1883.
    — Kevin Dayhoff, Baltimore Sun, 9 Sep. 2023
  • For me, memory is one of the great organizing principles of storytelling, often even more than the oral tradition.
    — Willing Davidson, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2023
  • The song was released by the Korean children’s entertainment company in 2016 but is really a product of oral tradition passed down as school and camp songs.
    — USA TODAY, 11 May 2023
  • The story of Gesar is considered one of Central Asia’s literary classics and was passed down in oral tradition for some 1,000 years, as well as literary, poetic and stage play versions.
    — Patrick Frater, Variety, 19 July 2023
  • But ultimately, for a guitar style that has been passed down for so long from relative to relative and shaped by that cultural oral tradition, Timofeyev believes that the authenticity of the style will change.
    — Alex Higgins, Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug. 2023
  • Geographically diverse, the oral tradition and literary material of the mythical creature live in the rhythm of words and the fabric of Mesoamerican folklore.
    — Sarah Quiñones Wolfson, Los Angeles Times, 16 Oct. 2023
  • Learn about the history of the American spiritual and its oral tradition with a recital by American Spiritual Ensemble.
    — Luann Gibbs, The Enquirer, 25 Feb. 2024
  • Inevitably, homiletics has found itself at the crossroads between a print tradition concerned with possessive authorship and an oral tradition concerned with charisma and communion.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 22 Mar. 2024
  • Folklore, defined broadly, is an oral tradition that stretches across generations.
    — Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times, 16 Dec. 2023
  • His explorations of identity and self-definition, of the importance of the oral tradition in literature, and of his Kiowa heritage were interwoven with reverent evocations of landscape in passages of soaring lyrical prose.
    — John Motyka, New York Times, 29 Jan. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oral tradition.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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