entertainment
Americannoun
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entertainments
plural
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the act of entertaining; agreeable occupation for the mind; diversion; amusement.
Solving the daily crossword puzzle is an entertainment for many.
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something affording pleasure, diversion, or amusement, especially a performance of some kind.
The highlight of the ball was an elaborate entertainment.
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hospitable provision for the needs and wants of guests.
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a divertingly adventurous, comic, or picaresque novel.
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Obsolete. maintenance in service.
noun
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the act or art of entertaining or state of being entertained
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an act, production, etc, that entertains; diversion; amusement
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of entertainment
Explanation
Entertainment is amusement, usually involving a performance. The clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show, a stadium rock concert, your friends fighting over the last potato chip––these are all forms of entertainment. Entertainment is from the Old French word entretenir meaning hold together or support. It was associated with hospitality––when you entertained a guest, you were keeping them happy. From there, it came to mean amuse or distract. The entertainment is the amusement or the distraction––we talk about theatrical entertainment as shows, visual entertainment as the stuff you like to look at, and audio entertainment as mostly music.
Vocabulary lists containing entertainment
Media Literacy - High School
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Media Literacy - Middle School
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Media Literacy - Introductory
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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:
Shares are down about 2.5% over the past year, reflecting rising costs for essentials such as memory chips that are affecting the broader entertainment and gaming industry.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 14, 2026
What these sales fail to capture is what people spend on services such as travel, recreation and entertainment.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 14, 2026
Sales of the British news and entertainment magazine are down on average 20% year on year in weeks where heatwaves have been declared, Catherine Parsons said.
From BBC ● Aug. 13, 2026
More than 100 people had to abandon ship after a fire engulfed a children's entertainment tour boat off southwestern Turkey on Thursday, officials said.
From Barron's ● Aug. 13, 2026
Tonight’s dinner has no scheduled entertainment, not even the standard piano accompaniment, but entertainment arrives unannounced at the door nonetheless.
From "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern
Today, dragons and dungeon crawls are common entertainments.
From Salon ● Jun. 24, 2026
"Christmas football was originally rooted in a wider tradition of communal entertainments," Professor Martin Johnes of Swansea University told BBC Sport.
From BBC ● Dec. 24, 2025
The acting is fine, the characters generally endearing, and anyone familiar with local theater—or even just entertainments about local theater—will know the types.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 11, 2025
Colliding art and science melds these opposing sides, while providing a subtle sense of conflict on which all popular entertainments depend.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 29, 2024
In advance, the Valentines had reduced the Saturday-night entertainments.
From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead
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.
