The clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show or stadium rock concert, your friends fighting over the last potato chip—all these are entertainment. From the Old French entretenir (“to hold together”), it became associated with hospitable provision for guests; later, it came to mean amusement or distraction, usually involving some kind of performance: the circus, a play, a satirical novel.
Articles About Entertaiment
Bates and Ferri (2010) define entertainment as “an activity understood objectively, characterized by communication between text and audience from an external stimulus, offering pleasure, requiring an audience and occurring in a passive form.” The prefix inter means “inside” and the suffix ten, from the Indo-European root tenere (“to stretch”), suggests that entertaining is something that must be stretched or extended to keep people engaged.