Entertainment needs an audience; leisure can stay private
Entertainment holds attention or delights—an idea, task, or more often a show. Story, music, drama, dance, and games recur across cultures. Latin roots suggest holding mutually; the amuse sense of to entertain rose in the 1620s. An audience turns private play into entertainment.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces entertain to Latin and French roots meaning among plus to hold, and cites William Caxton using it in 1490, while the verb took on its sense of amusing someone in the 1620s. Scale is almost limitless: one person picking a recording, a dinner for two, a party, a stadium show, or a worldwide broadcast. Psychologists describe media entertainment as serving gratification, with no other payoff expected apart from, perhaps, a final score.
Tastes shift with history. Rome imported wild-animal hunts from Carthage, spawning an international trade in beasts, and the Colosseum, opened in AD 80 with a hundred days of games, seated fifty thousand. Fencing and archery moved from war and hunting to spectator sport, cooking became a televised global contest, and public executions, once crowd-pleasers, are now illegal in most countries. During China's Cultural Revolution the Communist Party sanctioned revolutionary opera.
Courts trained and paid performers. In Maya cities spectacles filled plazas before palaces, the Mughals brought the durbar to India and the British inherited its ceremonies, and Korean court dance was staged at palace banquets. Much later moved outward: Korean masked dance-dramas began with village shaman rites and became commoners' fare, the Goryeo Narye festival gained a secular closing act, and jousting survives in children's play. Byzantine elites, at least before the Komnenos era of 1081 to 1185, seated men and women apart at banqueting entertainments.
Education and marketing borrow entertainment's pull, producing hybrids dubbed edutainment and infotainment. Serious works also entertain while asking what it means to be human, as Hamlet and The Matrix do.
Source: Entertainment
