Tragedy

How to spell tragedy

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tragedy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tragedy mean?

1. nounA very sad or distressing event, especially one involving death or great suffering.
2. nounA serious play with an unhappy ending, typically about the downfall of the main character.

Tragedy in a sentence

• The factory fire was a tragedy that claimed several lives.

• The students staged a Greek tragedy for the autumn production.

• The whole town mourned the tragedy for weeks afterwards.

• Every tragedy in the festival ended with the hero's ruin.

Where does tragedy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek tragoidia, the name for a serious dramatic performance, which was built from tragos meaning 'goat' and oide meaning 'song', literally a 'goat song'. Scholars are not entirely certain why the goat figured in the name; popular explanations include a goat awarded as a prize to the winning playwright, or a goat sacrificed at the festivals of Dionysus where these plays were staged. The Greeks used the term for grand stage dramas in which a noble figure met a calamitous end, and the Romans took it into Latin as tragoedia. From there it passed through Old French as tragedie before settling into English in the late 1300s. Over time its meaning broadened beyond the theatre to cover any dreadful, sorrowful real-life event, while the everyday spelling kept the single 'g' and the soft 'g' sound that trip up writers who expect a doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• trag- (from Greek tragos: goat)
• -edy (from oidia/oide: song)
• -y (noun ending)