About

Whether it’s a theater production, music concert, comedy show, or video game, entertainment is all about taking us into another world and making the audience forget their worries. It is a form of recreation that can bring joy and stimulate learning, but it can also have negative effects if not properly regulated [1]. These examples are automatically gathered from corpora and other sources on the web and do not reflect the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
The word entertainment comes from the Medieval Latin intertenere, meaning to hold inside. The prefix inter means “inside” and the suffix tenere derives from the Indo-European root ten, which meant to stretch or extend.