First recorded in 1865–70
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Snider’s slow, elegantly understated and, within bounds, reverential opera operates as much as a passion play as an opera.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 7, 2025
“But we have an endless desire to bring our passion play back to the stage and we are highly motivated.”
From Seattle Times ● May 7, 2022
The painful 20-day passion play that followed — staged in committee rooms, Senate floor debates, hallway protests and millions of private conversations — did little to alter the future makeup of the Supreme Court.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 6, 2018
Watergate is the stuff of grand tragedy, the great passion play of our politics.
From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2017
For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even about the syllogism.
From A Preface to Politics by Lippmann, Walter
Early successes include the groundbreaking Passion play in Port Talbot with Michael Sheen in 2011, which lasted three days and attracted 25,000 spectators.
From BBC ● Dec. 18, 2024
"Superstar" is structured similarly to a traditional Christian Passion play, depicting Jesus' final days.
From Salon ● Apr. 16, 2022
No wonder his contemporaries have rushed to help prop up Elder’s Passion play of pomposity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 27, 2021
It was the fifty-eighth anniversary of the operation, which ended in catastrophe; the annual commemoration has become a kind of Miami Passion play.
From The New Yorker ● Apr. 29, 2019
Indeed, so religious has the place become that on Good Friday the Passion play is acted in the Cathedral, and without the least sense of incongruity.
From Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo Comprising a Tour Through North and South Italy and Sicily with a Short Account of Malta by Devereux, W. Cope
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.
