Entertaiment is the act of amusing, gratifying, or delighting people. It can take many forms, including music, sports and games, live performances, reading novels or short stories, playing video games, watching movies, creating visual art, and so on. It is often a way of relieving boredom or stress, though it may also be used for pleasure in and of itself.
The suffix -ment is a common one for forming nouns from verb stems (as in amazement, betterment, merriment) in English, and it replaced Latin -mentum in Vulgar Latin and Old French. It carries the meaning of ‘holding inside, keeping up’ and derives from Latin inter- ‘among’ + tenere ‘to hold, stretch’ (from PIE root *ten-‘stretch’).
This article was adapted from several online sources and was reviewed by Merriam-Webster’s editors.