cabaret
[kab-uh-rey for 1–4, 6, 7; kab-uh-ret for 5]
- a restaurant providing food, drink, music, a dance floor, and often a floor show.
- a café that serves food and drink and offers entertainment often of an improvisatory, satirical, and topical nature.
- a floor show consisting of such entertainment: The cover charge includes dinner and a cabaret.
- a form of theatrical entertainment, consisting mainly of political satire in the form of skits, songs, and improvisations: an actress whose credits include cabaret, TV, and dinner theater.
- a decoratively painted porcelain coffee or tea service with tray, produced especially in the 18th century.
- Archaic. a shop selling wines and liquors.
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- to attend or frequent cabarets.
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Origin of cabaret
Synonyms
See more synonyms for on Thesaurus.comDictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for cabaret
Contemporary Examples
Then we were dropping in on some cabaret in Denver, or perhaps it was a restaurant in Nevada.
Like Fosse did with Cabaret, Marshall excised two major characters: the Narrator and the Mysterious Man.
Later, at the Rose.Rabbit.Lie club, Amber spontaneously sing “Proud Mary” with a cabaret singer.
Blacklace also hosts nights for Killing Kittens, a sex club of sorts with cabaret acts held at venues around the U.K.
Alan Cumming shimmered darkly and brilliantly as the emcee in the Cabaret performance.
Historical Examples
It was a tall, hideous house, with a cabaret on the first floor.
The DestroyerBurton Egbert Stevenson
We went from one cabaret to another, laughing at everything.
PossessedCleveland Moffett
It is a narrow lane, and there is a cabaret at each corner of it.
Under Wellington's CommandG. A. Henty
You had better leave your horse at some cabaret on this side of the town, and go in on foot.
No Surrender!G. A. Henty
A peasant, with a horse and cart, was standing in front of a cabaret.
No Surrender!G. A. Henty
cabaret
- a floor show of dancing, singing, or other light entertainment at a nightclub or restaurant
- mainly US a nightclub or restaurant providing such entertainment
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Word Origin
C17: from Norman French: tavern, probably from Late Latin camera an arched roof, chamber
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Word Origin and History for cabaret
n.
1650s, from French cabaret, originally "tavern" (13c.), of uncertain origin, perhaps from Middle Dutch cambret, from Old French (Picard dialect) camberete, diminutive of cambre "chamber" (see chamber). The word was "somewhat naturalized" in this sense [OED] It came to mean "a restaurant/night club" in English from 1912; extension of meaning to "entertainment, floor show" is from 1922.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper