Chorus

How to spell chorus

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chorus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chorus mean?

1. nounThe repeated part of a song, or a group of people who sing together.
2. verbTo say or sing something together at the same time.

Chorus in a sentence

• noun

  Everyone joined in for the final chorus of the song.

• verb

  The children chorus their answer in perfect unison.

• noun

  She sang in the local chorus every Thursday evening.

• verb

  The fans chorus the team's name as the players walked out.

Where does chorus come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word travelled into English from the Latin chorus, which the Romans had taken directly from the ancient Greek khoros. In Greece a khoros was a group of performers who danced and sang together, especially the band of singers who commented on the action in classical drama; the term covered both the dancing and the singing as a single communal act. Latin adopted the word and kept the theatrical sense, and it passed into English in the late 1500s, just as English drama was flourishing. From the idea of voices joined as one came the familiar musical meaning of a refrain that everyone sings, and the broader sense of any large group saying the same thing at once. The same Greek root survives in 'choir' and 'choreography', and it explains the spelling trap: the opening 'ch' is pronounced like a hard k, and the word ends in the Latin -us rather than a more expected -ous.

How the word is built

• chor- (from Greek khoros: a band of dancers and singers)
• -us (Latin noun ending)