Okuzeka
Literature vocabulary · Drama and Theatre

Play

Meaning in literature, with examples

/pleɪ/nounCore term

In literature, play means: A piece of writing for the theatre, made up of dialogue and stage directions, that actors perform in front of an audience.

In Turkish: oyun, tiyatro oyunu, piyes

How it is used

Playwrights write plays; theatres stage, put on or produce them; actors perform in them; audiences see or watch them. Plays are divided into acts and scenes, and the written version is called the script or text.

Example sentences

  1. The school is putting on a play by Haldun Taner this spring.

  2. Reading a play is very different from watching it in the theatre.

Common collocations

  • write a play
  • stage a play
  • put on a play
  • one-act play
  • see a play
  • dramaLiterature written to be performed by actors on a stage, telling a story through dialogue and action; also a single serious play.
  • playwrightA person who writes plays for the theatre, and sometimes for radio or television, creating the dialogue and stage directions that actors perform.
  • actOne of the main parts into which a play is divided, usually made up of several scenes and often separated by an interval.
  • stage directionsInstructions in the text of a play, usually in italics or brackets, that describe the setting, the actors' movements, tone of voice or lighting.
  • dialogueThe words that characters speak to each other in a story, play or film; in prose it is usually shown in quotation marks.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Drama and Theatre

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: