In the context of a student software project we are investigating the use of WordNet for improving the automatic detection and classification of actors (or characters) mentioned in folktales. Our starting point is the book “Classification of International Folktales”, out of which we extract text segments that name the different actors involved in tales, taking advantage of patterns used by its author, Hans-Jo ̈rg Uther. We apply on those text segments functions that are implemented in the NLTK interface to WordNet in order to obtain lexical semantic information to enrich the original naming of characters proposed in the “Classification of International Folktales” and to support their translation in other languages.