cabaret
Americannoun
-
a restaurant providing food, drink, music, a dance floor, and often a floor show.
-
a caf é that serves food and drink and offers entertainment often of an improvisatory, satirical, and topical nature.
- Synonyms:
- club, supper club, nightclub
-
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.
verb (used without object)
noun
-
a floor show of dancing, singing, or other light entertainment at a nightclub or restaurant
-
a nightclub or restaurant providing such entertainment
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of cabaret
1625–35; < French: tap-room, Middle French dial. ( Picard or Walloon) < Middle Dutch, denasalized variant of cambret, cameret < Picard camberete small room (cognate with French chambrette; see chamber, -ette)
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Their music was a blend of blues rock and hard rock with elements of cabaret.
From BBC ● Jul. 15, 2026
It opens with a big-band cover of the 1920 standard “Whispering,” leading into the track, and closes with a reference to the 1947 French cabaret song “C’est si Bon.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 15, 2026
The “Firework” hitmaker and Trudeau confirmed their relationship in October, when they stepped out hand in hand at a cabaret show in Paris, where they had been celebrating Perry’s birthday.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 12, 2026
Covering not just movies and television but also theater and cabaret, Reed, a Southerner who seemed as much a part of Manhattan as the skyline, lorded over the arts with a homogenizing mainstream peremptoriness.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 12, 2026
In 1916 Satie concocted a baldly insulting parody of themes from Gounod’s opera Mireille, and several of his cabaret songs make fun of Massenet’s supposed sentimentality.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
In Belle Époque Paris, the cabarets of Montmartre rebelled against industrial modernity and spawned an aggressive avant-garde sensibility.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 17, 2026
Since debuting Lady Bushra four years ago, Amir has travelled the world performing at comedy nights and cabarets - from Los Angeles to Liverpool.
From BBC ● Apr. 22, 2024
Grünbaum was the son of a Jewish art dealer and law school student who began performing in cabarets in Vienna in 1906.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 19, 2024
“Sifts through scores of queer gazettes, posters, newspapers and oral histories that documented public spaces around the country, from the leather bars of San Francisco to the drag cabarets of Kansas City.”
From New York Times ● Jan. 11, 2024
Argentine sightseers crowded the docks to see the world-famous explorers, and showered the crew with invitations to dinners, dances, and cabarets.
From "Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World" by Jennifer Armstrong
Louder than, and about as funny as Jimmy Durante, Jack White is 44, has been hoofing, gagging, minstreling, cabareting since 1911.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
