The word means simply "story" in Latin, and it gives us many English words, such as "fable," but also "fabulous." Today people use "fabulous" simply to mean something "good, great, excellent," but originally it meant something celebrated in myth or legend

More important, in the Romance languages, the late Latin word fabulare, "to tell stories, to narrate," came to have a more and more general meaning until it became the standard verb of speaking, as in Spanish hablar, which is directly descended from Latin fabulare, as is the Portuguese falar. The Greek word parabola, "parable," gave rise to a similar late Latin word, parabolare, also meaning "to tell stories," and this in turn gave rise to the Italian parlare and French parler. The poor Latin loquor did not have much of a future at all, compared to the fortunes of fabulare and parabolare.