A clown at a birthday party, the Broadway show, your friends fighting over the last potato chip—all of these are examples of Entertainment. From the French word entretenir, which means hold together or support, entertainment came to mean something affording pleasure or diversion and often associated with hospitable provision for guests. The word entertainment is also used to describe the act of entertaining, as in a theatrical production or a sports game, or to refer to visual or audio entertainment, such as a movie or music.

Bates and Ferri (2010) define entertainment as an activity understood objectively, which encompasses communication between text and audience from external stimulus, off ers pleasure, requires an audience to exist and occurs in a passive form. Read more about Entertainment on our blog.