popular song

American  

noun

1. a song that is written to have an immediate and wide appeal and is usually popular for only a short time, but that sometimes is of a sufficiently high quality to become part of the permanent repertoire of popular music and jazz.

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Etymology

Origin of popular song

First recorded in 1835–45

Example Sentences

There was a popular song in the summer of 1961, when I was 10, the theme to the movie “The Guns of Navarone,” and I got it in my mind that when it played on the radio that it was really a secret code announcing “the attack has begun.”

From The Wall Street Journal

Each country awards 12 points to its most popular song while the second choice gets 10, and the rest are scored from eight to one.

From BBC

Messy was recently certified as the most popular song of 2025 by a British artist, with more than a billion streams around the world.

From BBC

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” documentary where Dylan is speaking about Allen Ginsberg and how Ginsberg had achieved heights that no other modern poet had, and he explains that the role that poetry once filled was now instead taken up by popular song: “We still remember those lines today,” he said, referring to poets at the level of recognition of Whitman.

From Salon

Its most popular song, “Lowdown,” was a dance-club hit and peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and No. 5 on the R&B chart before winning a Grammy for best R&B song.

From The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

• pop