Entertaiment is a broad term that may refer to one or more types of entertainment. The word’s roots are in the Medieval Latin intertenere, which means “to hold inside,” and the Indo-European root ten, which meant to stretch. The word has a long history of creative remix across different media, and its familiar forms have demonstrated an astonishing capacity for longevity.
Entertainment often hits on the points that the brain was evolved to react deeply to, such as social backstabbing and murders. Click on a collocation below to see more examples of it in context. These examples are automatically generated from various corpora and web sources. They do not represent the opinions of Merriam-Webster or its editors.