Aesopian

American  

[ee-soh-pee-uhn, ee-sop-ee-] / iˈsoʊ pi ən, iˈsɒp i- /

Also Aesopic

adjective

1. of, relating to, or characteristic of Aesop or his fables.

   a story that points an Aesopian moral.

2. conveying meaning by hint, euphemism, innuendo, or the like.

   In the candidate's Aesopian language, “soft on Communism” was to be interpreted as “Communist sympathizer.”

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Etymology

Origin of Aesopian

1870–75; < Late Latin Aesōpi ( us ) + -an

Example Sentences

If Brasher sometimes tends to moralize when he writes about birds, it isn’t Aesopian.

From Washington Post • Apr. 29, 2023

Beast epics used some of the Aesopian material, but they were much longer and more novelistic.

From The New Yorker • Apr. 27, 2015

Terry has noticed, as have others, the Aesopian motifs that occur, and includes slender, playful versions, sometimes modernised, of Aesop's fables himself.

From The Guardian • May 28, 2013

But like an Aesopian tortoise, the government scientists working with the Human Genome Project have continued pushing along.

From Time Magazine Archive

It is the Aesopian type that Aristotle has in view when he treats of the fable as a branch of rhetoric, not of poetry.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 1 "Evangelical Church Conference" to "Fairbairn, Sir William" by Various