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:
State visits are a mix of pageantry and politics, with the carefully choreographed hospitality providing an opportunity for talks about important strategic alliances and to promote military and business links.
From BBC ● Oct. 20, 2026
Some of these lines get at this crucial point that I think your music makes, which is that pageantry and sincerity can coexist.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 9, 2026
US President Donald Trump took Chinese leader Xi Jinping to see the founding documents of American democracy on Friday, capping a state visit full of pomp and pageantry but with no major breakthroughs.
From Barron's ● Sep. 25, 2026
The pandas, the pageantry and the warm words may help smooth this relationship.
From BBC ● Sep. 25, 2026
The clothes were worn on Christmas and New Year’s when families paraded their children on the streets in a pageantry designed to imply nonexistent wealth.
From "Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography" by Mark Mathabane
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
I. From Delphi to Camden—little Hoosier towns,— But here were classic meadows, blooming dales and downs And here were grassy pastures, dewy as the leas Trampled over by the trains of royal pageantries.
From Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) by Bill Nye
But it is in lyric Andalusia that these pageantries are most at home.
From Spanish Highways and Byways by Katharine Lee Bates
He revisited again, in thought, the blooming grove of Capreæ, the pageantries of Cesarea, the green lanes of Buckingham, the luxurious salon of Paris, and the twilight of the garden of Wahring.
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 by Various
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