Legend is a loanword from Old French that entered English usage circa 1340. The Old French noun legende derives from the Medieval Latin legenda.^[5] In its earliest English-language usage, the word indicated a narrative of an event.

By 1613, English-speaking Protestants began to use the word when they wished to imply that an event (especially the story of any saintnot acknowledged in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments) was fictitious.^[6] Thus, legend gained its modern connotations of "undocumented" and "spurious", which distinguish it from the meaning of chronicle.