Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary

creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized (given human
qualities, such as the ability to speak human language) and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral
lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim or saying.

A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of
nature as actors that assume speech or other powers of humankind.

Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the King James Version of the New Testament,
"μῦθος" ("mythos") was rendered by the translators as "fable"[1] in the First Epistle to Timothy, the
Second Epistle to Timothy, the Epistle to Titus and the First Epistle of Peter.[2]