suite
Pluralsuites
- 1A group of connected rooms, usually able to be closed off from other rooms by their own entrance.
They booked the honeymoon suite for the weekend.
The clinic occupies a suite of three rooms on the second floor.
- 2A group of related computer programs distributed together as a single package.
The company bundles its design suite with photo, video, and audio editors.
After the merger, the two companies' antivirus, firewall, and backup tools were sold as a single suite.
Note
In software the word names a product, not just a collection: an office suite, a security suite, a design suite. Each is a set of programs sold under one name and built to work with one another. A test suite is a different kind of thing, a set of tests run against software, and it sits closer to the general "set of things" meaning.
- 3A connected series of objects, or a number of things used or grouped together.
The museum displayed a suite of paintings from the artist's later years.
Lawmakers introduced a suite of reforms aimed at cleaning up the rivers.
Similarset, series, collection, package
Note
The broad "set" meaning, almost always followed by of: a suite of minerals, a suite of collections, a suite of bedroom furniture. The members are chosen or classed together, matched or meant to be used as a group, rather than simply piled up. Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963) displays a whole suite of furniture, and a suite of rooms sits right on the border with the hotel or office rooms.
- 4A musical form, popular before the sonata, made up of a series of pieces in the same key, mostly in various dance rhythms, sometimes with an elaborate prelude.
The composer arranged each suite around a single key, moving from allemande to gigue.
Baroque audiences enjoyed a suite far more than the later sonata.
Note
A Baroque form that holds contrast together with a single key. Dances of different rhythms, such as the allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, follow one another, sometimes after an elaborate prelude, and the form gave way to the sonata. Musicians tell it apart from the concert excerpt by its origin: this suite was composed as a sequence of dances from the start, not cut from a larger work.
- 5An excerpt of instrumental music drawn from a larger work that also contains other elements, such as the dancing in a ballet or the singing in an opera.
The concert program featured a suite arranged from the film's score.
Audiences hear the suite far more often than the full ballet it came from.
Note
Usually a title: the Nutcracker Suite, the Carmen Suite, the name of the ballet or opera followed by the word. What gets left behind is whatever needs a stage, such as the dancing and the singing, so the orchestral music can stand on its own in a concert hall. Film scores are often treated the same way, and audiences frequently know the suite better than the work it came from.
- 6The group of attendants, aides, and servants who accompany a person of high rank.
The ambassador traveled with a suite of aides and translators.
Behind the prince came a suite of courtiers in fine dress.
Similarretinue, entourage, train
Note
The human sense of a word borrowed from Middle French, and a doublet of suit: the same source word reaching English twice by different paths. Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792) promises that a duke's "suite of servants will be ours," and the word keeps that grand company. It fits ambassadors and princes moving with their people behind them, and it would sound inflated for an ordinary office staff.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Middle French "suite," and a doublet of the word "suit."