Theater

How to spell theater

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce theater

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does theater mean?

1. nounA building or room where plays, films, or other performances are presented to an audience.
2. nounThe activity, profession, or art of writing and performing plays.
3. nounA region in which significant military or strategic events take place.

Theater in a sentence

• They booked the downtown theater for the school production.

• She studied theater at college before joining a touring company.

• The Pacific theater saw heavy fighting throughout the war.

• The new movie theater has reclining seats and a huge screen.

• His career in theater spanned writing, directing, and acting.

• Commanders coordinated supplies across the entire theater of operations.

Where does theater come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word goes back to the ancient Greek theatron, which literally meant 'a place for viewing,' built on the verb theasthai 'to behold or look at' and the noun thea 'a sight or view.' The Greeks used it for the open-air seating banks where audiences watched dramatic contests. Latin took it over as theatrum, and from there it passed into Old French as theatre before reaching English in the late 1300s, at first describing the physical playhouse and later the wider art of drama. The American spelling theater, with the -er ending, comes from the reforms championed by Noah Webster in the early nineteenth century, who preferred spellings that matched the way the ending was pronounced. That reform is exactly the spelling trap here: writers everywhere still constantly see the older theatre in arts titles and company names, so the regular-looking theater can feel wrong even when it is correct.

How the word is built

• theatr- (from Greek theatron: a place for viewing)
• -er (American place/noun ending, reversing the -re of theatre)

British and American spelling

Theater is the American spelling. British English spells it theatre.