Theatre

How to spell theatre

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce theatre

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does theatre mean?

1. nounA building where plays and live performances are staged, or the art of dramatic performance itself.
2. nounA room in a hospital where surgical operations are carried out.
3. nounA large geographical area in which a war or major military operation takes place.

Theatre in a sentence

• They booked four seats at the theatre for the opening night.

• The surgeon scrubbed in before entering the operating theatre.

• Supplies were rerouted to the eastern theatre of the conflict.

• She studied drama and now teaches theatre at the local college.

• The patient was wheeled into theatre shortly after the anaesthetist arrived.

• Commanders coordinated forces across the entire theatre of operations.

Where does theatre come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the ancient Greek theatron, which literally meant 'a place for viewing' or 'a place for seeing'. It was built on the verb theasthai, 'to behold' or 'to watch', the same root that lies behind the words 'theory' and 'theorem', both originally tied to the idea of looking closely at something. The Greek term passed into Latin as theatrum and then into Old French as theatre, and it is this French form that English adopted in the late 1300s, first for the open-air arenas of the classical world and later for any building staging plays. The spelling theatre, with the -re ending, preserves that French route into English and remains standard in Britain and Canada, while American writers reshaped it to theater. The trap for the speller is precisely that final -re: the word ends on an unstressed schwa that the ear hears as 'ter', tempting the hand to write the American form by mistake.

How the word is built

• theatr- (from Greek theatron: a place for viewing)
• -e (English spelling of the French/Latin ending)

British and American spelling

Theatre is the British spelling. American English spells it theater.