Article
The clown at your kid’s birthday party, a Broadway show, a stadium rock concert, or just your friends fighting over the last potato chip–all are forms of entertainment. The word comes from the old French entretenir, meaning hold together or support; it was associated originally with hospitality and later shifted to amusement or distraction. It is sometimes abbreviated entmt on fliers or in industry news publications where space is limited, but it is not commonly used in general writing.
A famous example of entertainment is the story of Scheherazade, a professional Persian storytelling tradition turned into an orchestral work by Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel and Szymanowski, into a film directed by Pasolini and into innovative video games.
