repertory
Pluralrepertories
- 1A theater whose resident company stages works from a set repertoire, usually alternating them.
After drama school he joined a repertory in the Midwest, playing a new part almost every week.
This season the new comedy runs in repertory with Hamlet, the two alternating night by night.
Note
Theater people use the word for a way of scheduling as much as for a building. A play that runs in repertory with another alternates with it, instead of running until it closes and making way for the next. Don Shewey, reviewing a young company in Gay Community News in 1976, sees one of its productions running in repertory with another.
- 2The particular set of works that a performing company presents.
The company's repertory includes nine Shakespeare plays, any of which it can stage on short notice.
Funding cuts forced the troupe to shrink its repertory to a handful of crowd-pleasers.
Similarrepertoire
- 3A repertoire: the full range of pieces, skills, or techniques that someone can perform or draw on.
Her repertory of folk songs runs to well over a hundred titles.
A good coach helps young chess players widen their repertory of openings.
Similarrepertoire, range, stock
Note
Two English words grew from Late Latin repertōrium: this learned borrowing, taken straight from the Latin, and its doublet repertoire. In this broad sense they are interchangeable, so a repertory of folk songs is equally a repertoire of them. Repertory has also picked up stage meanings of its own, among them a theater with a resident company.
- 4A movie theater that specializes in showing classic or older films.
The city's last repertory house still runs double features of 1940s crime films on Fridays.
Streaming has made life hard for repertory cinemas that depend on fans of classic films.
Note
The film sense almost always sits in front of another noun: a repertory cinema, a repertory house, a season of repertory screenings. Standing alone it is rare, so the noun it modifies does the naming. It shares the stage word's idea of a house with a settled program, but where the resident-company playhouse is defined by who performs, the cinema is defined by the age of what it shows.
- 5A collection or store of things, or the place where a collection is kept.
The archive is a vast repertory of letters, maps, and photographs from the war years.
The abbey's library served as a repertory for manuscripts gathered from across the region.
Similarrepository, storehouse, store, treasury, collection
Practice
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Origin
A learned borrowing from Late Latin repertōrium. It is a doublet of repertoire.