A clown at a children’s party, the latest Broadway show, your friends fighting over the last potato chip—all of these can be entertainment. Entertainment is mostly associated with fun and amusement, but it can also have a serious purpose—ceremony, celebration, religious festival, or satire for instance. It is a broad and growing field that can encompass many forms of improvisational theatre, visual arts (art and design), books and poetry, live performances, film and television, and music. Click on a collocation to see examples.

From medieval Latin inter tenere, the prefix inter meaning “inside” and the suffix tenere, derived from the Indo-European root ten.