-]
| 1. | a building, part of a building, or outdoor area for housing dramatic presentations, stage entertainments, or motion-picture shows. |
| 2. | the audience at a theatrical or motion-picture performance: The theater wept. |
| 3. | a theatrical or acting company. |
| 4. | a room or hall, fitted with tiers of seats rising like steps, used for lectures, surgical demonstrations, etc.: Students crowded into the operating theater. |
| 5. | the theater, dramatic performances as a branch of art; the drama: an actress devoted to the theater. |
| 6. | dramatic works collectively, as of literature, a nation, or an author (often prec. by the): the theater of Ibsen. |
| 7. | the quality or effectiveness of dramatic performance: good theater; bad theater; pure theater. |
| 8. | a place of action; field of operations. |
| 9. | a natural formation of land rising by steps or gradations. |

. As with many early French borrowings (beauty, carriage, marriage), the stress moved to the first syllable, in conformity with a common English pattern of stress, and this pattern remains the standard one for theater today: [thee-uh-ter, theeuh
-]. A pronunciation with stress on the second syllable and the [ey] vowel: [thee-ey-ter] or sometimes [thee-ey-ter] is characteristic chiefly of uneducated speech.the·a·tre (thē'ə-tər) n. Variant of theater. |
Theatre
only mentioned in Acts 19:29, 31. The ruins of this theatre at Ephesus still exist, and they show that it was a magnificent structure, capable of accommodating some 56,700 persons. It was the largest structure of the kind that ever existed. Theatres, as places of amusement, were unknown to the Jews.