theater
Pluraltheaters
UK spellingtheatre
- 1A building containing a stage and seating where an audience gathers to watch plays, musical performances, public ceremonies, and similar events.
The restored theater reopened with a sold-out opera.
Many older theaters were designed with elaborate balconies and gilded ceilings.
Similarplayhouse
Note
The name puts the audience first. Through Old French and Latin it goes back to Greek théatron, "a place for viewing," from a verb meaning "to see, to watch, to observe." The building is named for what the crowd does, not for what happens on stage. Its near-synonym playhouse names it from the other side, by the play. The -er spelling is the American one, and it is the form to use in US writing.
- 2Drama and live performance considered as a profession or an art form.
Her career in theater spanned five decades and dozens of productions.
Modern theater often blends live acting with projected video and digital sound.
Note
The art rather than the building, and the grammar keeps them apart. You work in theater, with no article and no plural, as in "I worked in theater for twenty-five years," but you work at a theater. A life in the theater uses the article and still means the profession. Its theatrical nickname is the fabulous invalid.
- 3A building where films are shown to a paying audience on a large screen.
We caught the late showing at the theater downtown.
The theater added reclining seats and a larger screen last year.
Similarcinema
Note
American usage stretches the playhouse word to cover film: people go to the theater to see a movie, and the setting usually shows which kind of venue is meant. Where it might not, movie theater settles it. The plural stands for cinemas in general, so a new film opens in theaters, or is in theaters now.
- 4A region or specific field of action in which events unfold, usually with reference to war.
Commanders coordinated supplies and reinforcements across the entire theater.
The conflict spread into a second theater along the southern border.
Note
War borrows the stage here. A theater names the whole zone of a campaign rather than a single battlefield, and it usually follows a region. Colson Whitehead's veteran in The Nickel Boys (2019) "served in the Pacific theater, behind the lines," which shows that you can serve in a theater without ever seeing the front. The image keeps the playhouse in view: a place where action unfolds.
- 5A conspicuous but ultimately unproductive display of action, meant to impress onlookers rather than to accomplish anything.
Critics dismissed the inquiry as political theater.
The elaborate checks struck travelers as little more than theater.
Similarposturing, show, charade, pretense, display
Note
The scornful sense usually comes with a noun in front that names what is being faked: security theater, hygiene theater, enforcement theater. The last is the title of Andrew Rens's 2012 critique of ACTA. On its own the word works as a flat verdict, as in "the hearings were just theater." It is always an accusation, never a neutral word for ceremony.
- 6An operating room, or a locale equipped for surgery or supervised human experimentation.
The patient was wheeled into the theater shortly before noon.
Strict sterile procedures govern everything that enters the theater.
Note
Medicine borrowed the playhouse word for the room where surgery is done. Without an article it behaves like surgery, a place a patient is taken into or is in: get him into theater at once! With the article, or as the fuller operating theater, it names the room itself, and for a general listener operating room is the plainest choice.
- 7A large hall with tiered seating where lectures and presentations are delivered to an audience.
The university renovated its largest theater for first-year science courses.
Students filed into the theater and took their seats before the talk began.
Similarauditorium, hall
- 8Any place that rises in steps or tiers, resembling the banked seating of a performance hall.
The glacier carved a vast theater of rock out of the mountainside.
Terraced gardens descended in a green theater toward the lake.
Similaramphitheater, bowl
Practice
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Origin
This word comes through Middle English and Old French theatre from Latin theatrum, which came from Ancient Greek théatron, "a place for viewing." That in turn came from theáomai, meaning "to see, watch, or observe."