Comedy

How to spell comedy

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce comedy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does comedy mean?

1. nounA form of entertainment intended to make an audience laugh, or a humorous play, film, or performance.

Comedy in a sentence

• The new comedy had the whole cinema laughing.

• She prefers light comedy to anything dramatic.

Where does comedy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the ancient Greek komoidia, which described a humorous stage performance and is built from komos, meaning 'a merry revel or festive procession', combined with aoidos, meaning 'singer'. In the Greek theatre a comedy was originally any play with a cheerful, often satirical tone that ended happily, in contrast to tragedy. The term travelled into Latin as comoedia, then into Old French as comedie, and English adopted it in the late 1300s. For a long stretch it kept its broad theatrical sense: Dante famously titled his great poem the Commedia simply because it ended in joy rather than catastrophe, not because it was funny. The spelling preserves the single 'm' and the 'ed' from the Greek and Latin roots, which is the small trap, since the sound tempts some writers toward a doubled letter.

How the word is built

• comed- (from Greek komoidia: a comic performance)
• -y (noun suffix)