Stage

How to spell stage

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stage

What does stage mean?

1. nounA raised platform on which performers act, speak, or play to an audience.
2. nounA distinct period or step within a longer process or development.
3. verbTo organise and present an event, performance, or planned action.

Stage in a sentence

• noun

  The actors took their places on the stage before the curtain rose.

• noun

  The project is still at an early stage of planning.

• verb

  The union threatened to stage a walkout if talks collapsed.

• noun

  A single spotlight lit the empty stage at the start of the show.

• noun

  Each stage of the renovation had to be approved before the next began.

• verb

  The gallery plans to stage a major exhibition next spring.

Where does stage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word arrived in English in the 1200s from Old French estage, which meant a position, a storey of a building, or a place where someone stood or dwelt. That French form came from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin word staticum, built on the Latin verb stare, meaning 'to stand'. The idea of a raised standing place gradually narrowed: by the 1500s it named the raised platform on which actors stood to perform, and by extension the theatrical profession itself. The same notion of a standing point along a journey gave us the sense of a stage as one leg of a trip, and from there the stagecoach that paused at each stage. The modern meaning of a step or phase in a process simply continues that thread of a fixed point reached along the way. Because the spelling preserves the soft French ending, the silent final e is what keeps the g sounding soft.

How the word is built

• stage (from Old French estage 'a standing, position, dwelling', ultimately from Latin stare 'to stand')