genre means A kind; a stylistic category or sort, especially of literature or other artworks. It carries an Arena rating of 1538, earned across 15 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, genre ranks #394 of 42,791 for Qualifying, #426 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #521 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #551 of 17,135 for Most Malleable Words.
genre is pronounced /ˈ(d)ʒɑnɹə/.
Why “genre” is a great word
A category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content. From the French genre ("kind, sort, style"), from Old French gen(d)re, from Latin genus ("birth, origin, kind, race"), the word entered English in the 1770s. Unlike "style," which denotes the distinctive manner of an individual artist, or "medium," which names the material or method of expression, genre is a taxonomy of shared conventions, a collective agreement about what stories we tell and how we tell them. It is the dusty shelf where the Western keeps its spurs, the shadowed corridor down which the noir detective walks, the ornate chamber where the sonnet counts its syllables—the invisible architecture that shapes stories into rooms we recognize before we enter, offering comfort in their familiarity, even as we long for the work that transcends them.
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from French genre, from Old French gen(d)re, borrowed from Latin genere. Doublet of gender and genus.
noun
- A kind; a stylistic category or sort, especially of literature or other artworks.e.g.“The still life has been a popular genre in painting since the 17th century.”
verb
- To assign or conform to a genre, to make genre-specific.e.g.“For quotations using this term, see Citations:genre.”
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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