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theatrical

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//θiːˈætɹɪkəl//
  • United States//θiˈætɹɪkəl//

Of or relating to the theatre.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or relating to the theatre.

    12 July 2012, Sam Adams, AV Club Ice Age: Continental Drift The matter of whether the world needs a fourth Ice Age movie pales beside the question of why there were three before it, but Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that’s already been settled.

  2. 2

    Fake and exaggerated.

    The ceremony and its scene were characterised by that high sense of the theatrical which has marked the activities of the Third Reich.

Etymology

From Latin theātricus + -al. By surface analysis, theatre + -ical.

noun

  1. 1

    A stage performance, especially one by amateurs.

  2. 2

    A commercially produced film to be shown in movie theaters.

    Release schedules were stepped up so that virtually all of the summer theatricals are coming to video before year's end.

  3. 3

    A person who works in theatre.

    Both of her parents were theatricals — that is, the father played the violin and the mother attempted to dance but later she dropped the pretence.

Forms

plural
theatricals
comparative
more theatrical
superlative
most theatrical
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).