Farce

How to spell farce

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce farce

What does farce mean?

1. nounAn event or proceeding so absurd, mismanaged, or hollow that it cannot be taken seriously.
2. nounA type of comic drama that relies on improbable situations, exaggerated characters, and broad physical humour.

Farce in a sentence

• The disorganised meeting turned into a complete farce.

• The theatre staged a fast-paced farce full of slamming doors and mistaken identities.

• The trial was a farce, with key evidence ignored from the start.

• She wrote a stage farce in which two couples keep stumbling into the wrong hotel rooms.

Where does farce come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the Latin verb farcire, which literally meant 'to stuff' or 'to cram full', the same sense that gives us forcemeat (a stuffing) and the word 'infarct' in medicine. In medieval France the related noun farce was applied to comic material that was 'stuffed' into the gaps of otherwise serious religious plays, light interludes padding out solemn drama. From there French speakers used farce for a short, broadly comic stage piece full of improbable situations and exaggerated characters. English borrowed the word in the 1500s, keeping both the spelling and the theatrical meaning, and then extended it figuratively to any absurd or hollow proceeding that resembles low comedy. The soft -ce ending preserved from French, rather than an English -se, is the small spelling point worth remembering.

How the word is built

• farc- (from Latin farcire: to stuff)
• -e