Rehearsal

How to spell rehearsal

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce rehearsal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rehearsal mean?

1. nounA practice session in which a performance is run through before it is given in public.

Rehearsal in a sentence

• The cast arrived early for the dress rehearsal before opening night.

• The wedding rehearsal took place the evening before the ceremony.

Where does rehearsal come from?

Language of origin: French

Rehearsal traces back to the Old French verb rehercier, meaning to repeat or recite, which English adopted in the 1300s as 'rehearse'. The root is surprisingly agricultural: hercier meant to rake or harrow, drawn from herce, a harrow, which itself comes from the Latin hirpex, a large toothed rake dragged across a field. The idea of going back and forth over the same ground, raking it again and again, was carried over into the figurative sense of going over words or actions repeatedly until they are right. The abstract noun 'rehearsal', formed by adding the suffix -al, appeared by the late 1500s and quickly attached itself to the theatre and music, where performers practise a piece before an audience sees it. That hidden 'hearse' in the middle, unrelated to the funeral carriage despite sharing the same harrow-shaped origin, is the spelling trap, since the word sounds more like 'rehursal' than it looks.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• hearse (from Old French hercier: to rake or harrow over)
• -al (noun-forming suffix)