noun
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spectacular display or ceremony
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archaic pageants collectively
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of pageantry
Explanation
Pageantry is the grandeur that turns an event into an elaborate spectacle. The long ritual of a new queen's coronation is a good example of pageantry. In contrast to the simplicity of a small wedding ceremony in a friend's back yard, a grand, expensive wedding might include such pageantry as a parade of bridesmaids in rainbow-colored gowns, followed by a mariachi band and the bride arriving on the back of an elephant. Pageantry comes from pageant, which today is a "showy spectacle or parade," but in Middle English meant "stage or scene of a play."
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:
On television, on one of the three channels then available to us, we watched the pageantry and the pomp.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 1, 2026
Xi leading him on the tour was yet another moment for the cameras in a two-day trip heavy on pageantry but scant on details about policy agreed by both sides.
From BBC ● May 15, 2026
From the minute King Charles and Queen Camilla stepped onto the White House South Lawn, US networks dumped their standard diet of political warfare and breaking news for something rare: pure pageantry.
From BBC ● Apr. 29, 2026
The answers, though, seem largely incidental beside the pageantry of haute cuisine and burbling table talk.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 17, 2026
I never get tired of this—of the spectacle, of the pageantry.
From "The Cruel Prince" by Holly Black
An arrival ceremony on the South Lawn ranks among the most regal of pageantries that Washington has to offer, reserved usually for the most important of visitors and even then for special occasions.
From New York Times ● Sep. 23, 2015
He has conceived scintillating decors for Ziegfeld pageantries.
From Time Magazine Archive
The vain pomp and pageantries of courts and the splendour of fortune have ever been an ignis fatuus to seduce the people to their ruin.
From Secret History of the Court of England, from the Accession of George the Third to the Death of George the Fourth, Volume I (of 2) Including, Among Other Important Matters, Full Particulars of the Mysterious Death of the Princess Charlotte by Hamilton, Lady Anne
Of the joyous preparations to greet Queen Mary withal neither my grandfather nor grandmother were ever wont to discourse much at large, for they were holy-minded persons, little esteeming the pageantries of this world.
From Ringan Gilhaize or The Covenanters by Galt, John
Why all this glare of splendid eloquence, To paint the pageantries of guilty state?
From Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 The Works of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., in Nine Volumes by Johnson, Samuel
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.
