What Is Entertaiment?

A clown at a kid’s birthday party, Broadway shows, stadium rock concerts, even your friends fighting over the last potato chip: all of these are entertainment. The word comes from the Latin inter tenere, which means “to hold inside.” In the medieval sense of hospitality, it also meant to provide a pleasant diversion or amusement for guests—a form of entertaining that still exists today in initiatives like the SU2C model for translating cancer research breakthroughs into major advances against the disease.

According to Oliver and Bartsch (2010), entertainment is defined as anything that can be consumed, provides an external stimulus, offers pleasure, requires an audience, and happens in a passive form. It also refers to a type of work or activity. The more familiar forms of entertainment, such as theatrical and visual, are shown below.