Scenario

How to spell scenario

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce scenario

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scenario mean?

1. nounA described or imagined sequence of events, or a set of possible circumstances.

Scenario in a sentence

• The team prepared a contingency plan for the worst-case scenario.

• In this scenario, interest rates rise and house prices fall.

Where does scenario come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Scenario travelled into English from Italian, where it named the outline of a play's scenes pinned up backstage so the actors of the commedia dell'arte knew the running order of their improvised performance. The Italian word was built on the Latin scaena (also spelled scena), meaning the stage or scene of a theatre. That Latin term was itself borrowed from the Greek skene, which originally meant a tent or wooden hut, because the earliest Greek theatres used a tent-like structure behind the acting area where performers changed costume. English adopted scenario in the nineteenth century, first in this theatrical sense and then in film-making for a story outline, before it broadened in the twentieth century to mean any imagined sequence of events or set of circumstances. The spelling preserves its Italian shape: the soft 'sc' opening and the unusual '-ario' ending are exactly where writers slip, often inserting an extra 'e' to make the non-existent 'scenerio'.

How the word is built

• scen- (from Latin scaena/scena: stage, scene)
• -ario (Italian noun suffix denoting an outline or sequence)