In the mid-1970s Dale began collecting apocryphal anecdotes, which at the time were sometimes termed "whale-tumour stories," now more commonly known as contemporary or urban legends. This resulted in publication of "The Tumour in the Whale: A Collection of Modern Myths" (1978), the first popular compilation of and commentary on contemporary or urban legends and which American folklorist Jan Brunvand has described as "a landmark work." In 1976 Dale coined the word "foaf" (for "friend of a friend") to describe apocryphal narratives involving someone at some distance from the teller. He used this word in "The Tumour in the Whale" to signify that an anecdote in question "has been reported from several quarters, that its provenance is shady, that it is almost certainly a whale-tumour story." As the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) has since noted, "Dale pointed out that contemporary legends always seemed to be about someone just two or three steps from the teller – a boyfriend's cousin, a co-worker's aunt, or a neighbor of the teller's mechanic"; in recognition of this concept, the ISCLR in 1985 named its quarterly newsletter "FoafTale News". Brunvand holds that "international students of urban legends have accepted FOAF with enthusiasm as a shorthand reference to the claimed source of stories." "Foaf" was added to the "Oxford English Dictionary" in 2009. Dale continued his work on contemporary legends with the publications of "It's True ... It Happened to a Friend: A Collection of Urban Legends" (1984) and "The Wordsworth Book of Urban Legend: Tall Tales for Our Times" (2005).