1853 New Monthly Mag. 97 425 Mr. Irving was eminently endowed with the mytho-pœic faculty—the art of myth-making.

1865 E. B. Tylor Res. Early Hist. Mankind xi. 308 The myth-making power of the human mind.

1881 J. Royce Let. 28 Dec. in R. B. Perry Thought & Char. W. James (1935) I. 791 Ontology, whereby I mean any positive theory of an external reality as such, is of necessity myth-making.

1923 Philos. Rev. 32 269 The recognition of the true interrelatedness of all the higher categories is a practical guarantee that the mind is no longer in its myth-making or its sophistical stages.

1974 Listener 24 Jan. 111/3 There is..no causal connection between art and revolution..to suppose there is one is to take a step towards mythmaking.

1999 Guardian (Electronic ed.) 4 Nov. ‘I know at least half a dozen people who claim to have invented the dish [sc. chicken tikka masala],’ says Peter Grove... He refuses to name them, however, for fear of encouraging their rampant myth-making.

1893 Polit. Sci. Q. 8 269 Mr. Lincoln, with foresight and adroit purpose singularly unnoted by myth-making historians, effectively enlarged, by his debate with Douglas in 1858, the breach between the latter and Buchanan.

1907 Philos. Rev. 16 437 The greatest of all the products of the myth-making imagination, the Commedia of Dante.

1965 Times Lit. Suppl. 25 Nov. 1068/4 The myth-making gestures in her work.

1998 N.Y. Times 9 Jan. b33/1 A famous photograph, one of those carefully staged, myth-making pictures that she allowed of herself, shows her sitting in [the] narrow open-air entryway to her house.