Filk
adj, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Filk music. countable, uncountable
"Filk turns commercial culture back into folk culture, existing as a mediator between two musical traditions. Its raw materials come from commercial culture; its logic is from folk culture."
- 2 Filk song.; In general countable, uncountable
"Welcome to Harry Potter Filks, with nearly 3400 filks (including several dozen full-length musicals) by more than 250 authors from at least five continents, all on Rowling-related themes."
- 3 Filk song.; A filk song written as a parody of, or in the form of and with reference to, another song (which need not itself be a filk song). Compare verb transitive sense. countable, uncountable
"2006, citation in the Filk Hall of Fame He has recently started to accompany himself on the piano, and created such wonderful songs as "The Soul" (filk of "The Ship") and "Internal Knight"."
- 1 To perform filk music. intransitive
"I could have filked all night"
- 2 To participate in a filk circle, including singing along. intransitive
- 3 To write a parody of (a song). transitive
"1997 (?: "July A.S. XXXI") Medieval Melodies for Filking However, the practice of filking, of taking an existing melody and providing new, usually topical and/or satirical, lyrics, is in fact the direct counterpart of the Medieval practice of writing contrafacta."
- 1 About or inspired by science fiction, fantasy, horror, science, and/or subjects of interest to fans of speculative fiction; frequently, being a song whose lyrics have been altered to refer to science fiction; parodying. (However, much filk music is original rather than parodic.) not-comparable
"The blame/credit (choose one) for the first filk song is a little dubious. Like the man who tried to sit on two stools, it falls in the middle, between Poul Anderson who wrote a filk song called Barbarous Allen and Karen Anderson who egged him on and published it in Zed #774."
Example
More examples"The blame/credit (choose one) for the first filk song is a little dubious. Like the man who tried to sit on two stools, it falls in the middle, between Poul Anderson who wrote a filk song called Barbarous Allen and Karen Anderson who egged him on and published it in Zed #774."
Etymology
Originally "filk music" was a typo for "folk music" in a never-published essay on the influence of Science Fiction and Fantasy on folk music. Its first known deliberate use was by Karen Kruse Anderson in Die Zeitschrift für Vollständigen Unsinn (The Journal for Utter Nonsense) #774 (June 1953), for a song written by science-fiction author Poul Anderson.
Related phrases
More for "filk"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.