entertainment

American  

[en-ter-teyn-muhnt] / ˌɛn tərˈteɪn mənt /

noun

entertainments plural

1. the act of entertaining; agreeable occupation for the mind; diversion; amusement.

   Solving the daily crossword puzzle is an entertainment for many.

2. something affording pleasure, diversion, or amusement, especially a performance of some kind.

   The highlight of the ball was an elaborate entertainment.

3. hospitable provision for the needs and wants of guests.

4. a divertingly adventurous, comic, or picaresque novel.

5. Obsolete. maintenance in service.

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entertainment British  

/ ˌɛntəˈteɪnmənt /

noun

1. the act or art of entertaining or state of being entertained

2. an act, production, etc, that entertains; diversion; amusement

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• nonentertainment
  noun
• preentertainment
  noun
• self-entertainment
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• entertainments
  plural

Etymology

Origin of entertainment

First recorded in 1525–35; entertain + -ment

Explanation

Entertainment is amusement, usually involving a performance. The clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show, a stadium rock concert, your friends fighting over the last potato chip––these are all forms of entertainment. Entertainment is from the Old French word entretenir meaning hold together or support. It was associated with hospitality––when you entertained a guest, you were keeping them happy. From there, it came to mean amuse or distract. The entertainment is the amusement or the distraction––we talk about theatrical entertainment as shows, visual entertainment as the stuff you like to look at, and audio entertainment as mostly music.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

entertainment entertainments

Last week Monopoly Events, the promoter behind some of the biggest comic and entertainment conventions in the UK, banned Meta glasses from its gatherings.

From BBC ● Jul. 30, 2026

The country’s politics, finance, entertainment and technology aren’t concentrated in a single city.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 29, 2026

The live entertainment accelerator started in 2022 as a 10-week experiment and has since grown into a six-month intensive program with weekly guest speakers from Live Nation, which culminates in the annual block party.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 29, 2026

After an initial splurge on travel and entertainment, retirees are often lulled into a sense of complacency because their spending tends to decrease during the first decade after leaving the workforce.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 29, 2026

So my dad, with his entrepreneurial spirit, planned a fund-raising dinner at a local hotel, inviting some well-known speakers from the community as entertainment.

From "Proud" by Ibtihaj Muhammad

Today, dragons and dungeon crawls are common entertainments.

From Salon ● Jun. 24, 2026

"Christmas football was originally rooted in a wider tradition of communal entertainments," Professor Martin Johnes of Swansea University told BBC Sport.

From BBC ● Dec. 24, 2025

The acting is fine, the characters generally endearing, and anyone familiar with local theater—or even just entertainments about local theater—will know the types.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 11, 2025

Colliding art and science melds these opposing sides, while providing a subtle sense of conflict on which all popular entertainments depend.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 29, 2024

Ballets and Broadway musicals and entertainments of that sort will flourish everywhere and will probably make the common folk happier than did the grim, hostile, fascistic pronouncements of their former leaders.

From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole