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:
The ceremony, which featured pageantry, poetry, drama and music, marked the beginning of the seventh session of Holyrood since it was established in 1999.
From BBC ● Jun. 27, 2026
Mr. Ali, who directed the flashy but fun “Twelfth Night” that reopened the Delacorte last year, again piles on the pageantry.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 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
Everyone rushed to the waterfront to view the magnificent pageantry of the queen’s arrival.
From "Sterling Biographies®: Cleopatra: Egypt's Last and Greatest Queen" by Susan Blackaby
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 company of Framework Knitters sprang into being in the time of Charles II., and was then extremely prosperous, indulging in expensive pomp and pageantries.
From Memorials of Old London Volume I by Ditchfield, P. H. (Peter Hampson)
The pomps of the religion, the pageantries of the court, and the munificence of the nobility, were never before characterised by so much grandeur and profusion.
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 by Various
I pictured the gilded pageantries of the Tiber, the splendours of the pleasure-lost citizens.
From Glories of Spain by Wood, Charles W. (William)
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.
