Farse

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An old verb meaning to fill meat or poultry with a seasoned stuffing before cooking ; a variant spelling of farce, a light comedy built on exaggerated situations
2. Archaic term for stuffing a dish with seasoned forcemeat ; an alternative spelling of farce, a broad comic play or ridiculous situation
3. Used in older cooking writing to mean packing meat with stuffing ; another spelling for farce, a comedy relying on absurd and exaggerated events

Etymology: "Farse" is a doublet of "farce," meaning the two words share a common ancestor but reached English by different routes. The shared source is the Medieval Latin "farsa," a term tied to the practice of stuffing or filling, which in turn traces to the Old French "farsir," meaning to stuff. The sense of stuffing carried over into the theatre: short comic interludes were inserted, or "stuffed," into the gaps of religious plays and liturgical texts, and these filler pieces gave the word its dramatic meaning. "Farse" came into English through the Old French branch of this family, while "farce" was borrowed later, so the two forms have kept slightly different spellings and senses while remaining the same word at heart. Both preserve the original image of something packed into a space that was not meant to hold it.