cabaret
Americannoun
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a restaurant providing food, drink, music, a dance floor, and often a floor show.
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a caf é that serves food and drink and offers entertainment often of an improvisatory, satirical, and topical nature.
- Synonyms:
- club, supper club, nightclub
-
a floor show consisting of such entertainment.
The cover charge includes dinner and a cabaret.
-
a form of theatrical entertainment, consisting mainly of political satire in the form of skits, songs, and improvisations.
an actress whose credits include cabaret, TV, and dinner theater.
-
a decoratively painted porcelain coffee or tea service with tray, produced especially in the 18th century.
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Archaic. a shop selling wines and liquors.
verb (used without object)
-
to attend or frequent cabarets.
noun
-
a floor show of dancing, singing, or other light entertainment at a nightclub or restaurant
-
a nightclub or restaurant providing such entertainment
Etymology
Origin of cabaret
1625–35; < French: tap-room, Middle French dial. ( Picard or Walloon) < Middle Dutch, denasalized variant of cambret, cameret < Picard camberete small room (cognate with French chambrette; chamber, -ette )
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Which she does in a performance that has the tight focus of a good short story and the theatrical immediacy of what might be called a narrative cabaret.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 17, 2026
The “Firework” hitmaker and Trudeau confirmed their relationship in October, when they stepped out hand in hand at a cabaret show in Paris.
From MarketWatch • Feb. 23, 2026
One of her original creations, the faded cabaret queen Lola Heatherton, armored herself in plastered-on wigs and stage finery, façades obscuring the jittery desperation of a woman hanging on by the quicks of her fingernails.
From Salon • Feb. 4, 2026
The retelling of the first lady’s life recasts her as a petulant former cabaret performer who would rather be on stage than in the White House.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 17, 2025
Unlike the frivolous goings-on in Paris or New York, though, the cabaret style of Weimar Berlin had a deadly serious undertow.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.