Vaudeville

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈvɔ.d(ə).vɪl/

Definitions

1. a form of theatrical entertainment popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries featuring a variety of short, unrelated acts such as comedy sketches, musical performances, acrobatics, and animal acts
2. a style of theatrical performance featuring diverse short acts including comedy, music, dance, and acrobatics that dominated popular entertainment from the 1880s through 1920s
3. an entertainment format consisting of multiple unrelated variety acts—comedians, singers, dancers, and specialty performers—presented sequentially on a single stage

Etymology: The most famous explanation of "vaudeville" is a place name, and it is mostly a myth. Many accounts link the word to the Vau-de-Vire valley in Normandy, where the fifteenth-century poet Olivier Basselin supposedly wrote drinking songs, but the connection to the English word is not reliably documented. What is well established is the French side: "vaudeville" was a French term for a light song, and English borrowed it directly from French. The French word itself has a long and tangled history, and the sense that matters most for English is a theatrical one. In France the term came to mean a satirical or comic song, and by the early nineteenth century it referred to light comic plays with songs woven through them. English speakers adopted the word in that theatrical sense, and it came to name the American variety show format that thrived from the 1880s into the 1920s.

Synonyms: variety show, entertainment, musical revue