Anecdotes (Genre/Form Term)

LCSH (Anecdotes. UF Ana; Facetiae; Humor. BT Biography; Wit and humor)

Kennedy, X.J. The Longman dictionary of literary terms, c2006 (Anecdote. A short narrative usually consisting of a single incident or episode. Often humorous, anecdotes can be real or fictional. When they appear within a larger context, as an author's digression or a brief story told by one character to another, they tend to reveal something meaningful to the work as a whole.)

Görlach, M. An alphabetical list of English text types, in Text types and the history of English, c2004: p. 26 (anecdote: narrative of an amusing incident)

Oxford dictionaries website, June 25, 2014 (anecdote: 1. A short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person; 1.1. An account regarded as unreliable or hearsay; 1.2. The depiction of a minor narrative incident in a painting)

Merriam-Webster online, June 25, 2014 (anecdote, plural anecdotes also anecdota: a short story about an interesting or funny event or occurrence; ana, plural ana or anas: 1 : a collection of the memorable sayings of a person 2 : a collection of anecdotes or interesting information about a person or a place; facetiae, noun plural: witty or humorous writings or sayings)

Wikipedia, June 25, 2014 (An anecdote is a short and amusing but serious account, which may depict a real/fake incident or character. Anecdotes can be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always presented as based in a real incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, usually in an identifiable place. However, over time, modification in reuse may convert a particular anecdote to a fictional piece, one that is retold but is "too good to be true". Sometimes humorous, anecdotes are not jokes, because their primary purpose is not simply to evoke laughter, but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate a character trait in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to its very essence.)

Dictionary.com, June 25, 2014 (anecdote noun, plural anecdotes or for 2, anecdota. 1. a short account of a particular incident or event, especially of an interesting or amusing nature. 2. a short, obscure historical or biographical account. Synonyms: story, yarn, reminiscence)

Vocabulary.com, June 25, 2014 (anecdote. A short, amusing true story is an anecdote. You might come back from a crazy spring break with a lot of anecdotes to tell. The roots of anecdote lie in the Greek word anekdota, meaning "unpublished." The word's original sense in English was "secret or private stories"--tales not fit for print, so to speak. It can still have connotations of unreliability, as in the phrase "anecdotal information." But the most common sense today is that of "a funny story about something that happened.")