Meaning & use
minuet
Last updated
Meanings
nouncountableold-fashioned
A slow, graceful dance for couples in three-beat time that was fashionable at European courts in the 1600s and 1700s.
Grammar: A countable noun: dance a minuet, two minuets.
Patterns
- dance a minuet
- a minuet for something
The guests in powdered wigs danced a minuet at the palace ball.
The students practiced the steps of the minuet in costume.
She learned the minuet for the school's history festival.
nouncountablemusic
A piece of music in a stately three-beat rhythm, often a movement in a classical symphony or sonata.
Grammar: Often followed by and trio, a standard pairing in classical works.
Patterns
- the minuet and trio
The third movement of the symphony is a graceful minuet.
The pianist played a short minuet by Bach as an encore.
Mozart often placed a minuet and trio before the finale.
Word forms
| plural | minuets |
|---|
Common combinations
- dance a minuet
- They danced a minuet in the grand hall.
- minuet and trio
- The minuet and trio provides a calm pause in the symphony.
- stately minuet
- A stately minuet opened the concert.
- court minuet
- The court minuet required careful bows and curtsies.
- play a minuet
- She plays a minuet on the harpsichord.
Synonyms and how they differ
- waltz
- A waltz is also in three-beat time but is faster, rounder, and belongs to a later period than the stately minuet.
- gavotte
- A gavotte is another old court dance, but it is in duple time and livelier than the minuet.
- pavane
- A pavane is an even slower and older processional dance, whereas the minuet is lighter and later.
Word family
- minuetto noun
- the Italian form of the word, found in music scores
- menuet noun
- a French spelling of minuet
Commonly confused: minuet or minute?
minuet vs minute
Minute (a unit of time) has the same French root idea of smallness but is unrelated in meaning; a minuet is a dance.
Practice
The slow, stately three-beat dance of the 18th-century French court is called the ___.
Choose one answer.
The minuet is the courtly dance in triple time. A polka is a fast Bohemian dance in two beats, and a jig is a lively folk dance.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “minuet”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.