A clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show, your friends fighting over the last potato chip–all of these are forms of entertainment. From the French entretenir (to hold together or support), which was associated with hospitality, it came to mean amusement or distraction. It is now usually used in the form of a verb, referring to the act of entertaining, as in “the clown entertained the children.” Click on a collocation for more examples.
This article is adapted from The Cambridge Dictionary of English Word Formation. Copyright