Scherzo
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A piece of music or a movement from a larger piece such as a symphony; especially, a piece of music played in a playful manner.
"At seven Val knocked – three shorts and one long, out of the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth – and I rushed to open."
- 2 a fast movement (usually in triple time) wordnet
Example
More examples"At seven Val knocked – three shorts and one long, out of the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth – and I rushed to open."
Etymology
Borrowed from Italian scherzo (“joke, play”), from scherzare (“to joke, jest”), from Lombardic *skerzan (“to jump merrily, enjoy oneself, jest”), from Proto-Germanic *skertaną (“to hop, jump”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kerǝd- (“to dance, jump”). Akin to Middle High German scherzen (“to frolic, jump merrily, hop up and down”) (modern German scherzen (“to joke”), Scherz), Norwegian skjerta (“to joke”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.