Scenery

How to spell scenery

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce scenery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scenery mean?

1. nounThe natural features of a landscape considered in terms of their visual appearance.
2. nounThe painted backdrops, hangings, and constructed sets used on a stage.

Scenery in a sentence

• The mountain scenery on the drive home was breathtaking.

• The stagehands shifted the scenery between each act.

• Tourists travel to the coast for its dramatic scenery.

• The production budget covered costumes, lighting, and scenery.

Where does scenery come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word grows out of scene, which English took in the 1500s from the Latin scaena, itself borrowed from the Greek skene, a word that literally meant a tent or wooden stage building set up behind the actors. In the Greek theatre the skene was the painted structure that gave the performance its visual backdrop, and that theatrical sense carried straight into English. By the early 1700s writers added the collective suffix -ery to make scenery, meaning the painted hangings and constructed views used on a stage. From there the sense broadened to cover any pleasing arrangement of natural features in a landscape, as if the countryside were a stage set arranged for the eye. The silent c, inherited from the Latin spelling, is the part that trips writers up, since the word sounds as though it begins simply with an s.

How the word is built

• scene (stage, view, from Greek skene 'tent, stage')
• -ery (suffix forming collective nouns)