Concert

How to spell concert

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce concert

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does concert mean?

1. nounA live public performance of music by one or more performers.

Concert in a sentence

• The orchestra sold out every seat for the charity concert.

• We queued for two hours to buy tickets to the rock concert.

Where does concert come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word arrived in English in the late 1500s from French concert, which itself came from Italian concerto, meaning a harmonious agreement or, in music, a performance of voices and instruments together. Behind these stands the Latin verb concertare, formed from con-, meaning 'together', and certare, meaning 'to contend, strive or settle a dispute'. The original Latin sense was almost the opposite of harmony: to fight things out or compete. Over time the idea softened from contending side by side to acting in agreement, and Italian musicians applied it to performers sounding together, which gave us both the musical 'concert' and the older sense of doing something 'in concert', meaning jointly. The same root surfaces in the related musical word 'concerto', a useful reminder that the spelling keeps a single c in the middle, not the 'cert' you might expect from words like 'certain'.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• cert (from Latin certare, to contend or settle; ultimately from concertare, to bring into agreement)