Melodrama

Definition: Melodrama

Melodrama

Noun

1. An extravagant comedy in which action is more salient than characterization.

Date "melodrama" was first used: 1802. (references)

Synonyms within Context: Melodrama

Context	Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus).
The Drama	Play, drama, stage play, piece, five-act play, tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta, lever de rideau, interlude, afterpiece, exode, farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta, harlequinade, pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe, ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame; melodrama, melodrame; comidie larmoyante, sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue;duologue trilogy; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy.
Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus.

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Specialty Definition: Melodrama

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

A melodrama, in the broadest sense, is a serious drama that can be distinguished from tragedy by the fact that it is open to having a happy ending. In practice, it is a rather pejorative term.

Historical sense

Melodrama, in its historical sense, was a sort of play with a romantic, sensational plot which also contained songs or music used as interludes. The word itself is a portmanteau word made from melody and drama. In 1775, Jean-Jacques Rousseau produced a play, Pygmalion, in which music was played to accompany certain scenes and the spoken words of the actors. The addition of songs to plays together with spoken passages was, of course, the beginning of musical theatre, the operetta, and the German Singspiel. The use of unsung musical accompaniments to action on stage was a precursor of the modern film score; almost all films have musical backdrops in certain scenes.

Current use

Poster for The Perils of Pauline, (1914)

Salty Sam was tryin' to stuff Sweet Sue in a burlap sack.

He said, "If you don't give me the deed to your ranch, I'm gonna tie you to the railroad tracks!"

---Along Came Jones, by The Coasters

In current usage, the sensationalistic plots of these original melodramas have swallowed up the other senses of the word. Melodrama as currently used is a mildly pejorative word in literary and other sorts of criticism, meaning a drama primarily characterised by sensational plots and blatant emotional appeals to conventional sentiment, but which is typically distinguished from tragedy by often having a happy ending. When melodrama is used in the pejorative sense, it is usually because the critic feels that the sensationalism of the plot lacks realism, or that the characters are stock heroes and villains with little room for characterization. Melodrama is ubiquitous on television: it is evident, for example, in a long series of TV movies about diseases or domestic violence, or the large number of hour-long television programs about lawyers, police officers, or physicians.

Issues melodrama is a subspecies of melodrama in which current events or politics are given a dramatic treatment, hoping to use some recent crime or controversy as a vehicle to draw an emotional response from the viewer. The usual method is to involve lawyers, police officers, or physicians, who can then make speeches about the crime or controversy being dramatized. By this artifice, the dramatist seeks to engage the audience's recently refreshed sense of fear or moral disapproval, while simultaneously maintaining the posture that the drama so produced is timely and socially engaged.

See also: soap opera, legal drama, serial, kitsch, camp

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Melodrama."

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Crosswords: Melodrama

English words defined with "melodrama": melodramatic, melodramatically, Melodrame. (references)

Specialty definitions using "melodrama": Field of the Forty Footsteps ♦ Home, Sweet Home ♦ Juveniles. (references)

Non-English Usage: "Melodrama" is also a word in the following languages with English translations in parentheses.

Czech (melodrama), Dutch (melodrama), Esperanto (melodramatic), German (melodrama), Portuguese (melodrama, melodramatic), Serbo-Croatian (melodrama), Spanish (melodrama), Swedish (melodrama).

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Modern Usage: Melodrama

Domain

Usage

Movie/TV Titles

Melodrama (1972)

Washington Melodrama (1941)

Manhattan Melodrama (1934)

A Melodrama of Yesterday (1912)

Melodrama from the Bowery On the Stage; or (1907)

Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Commercial Usage: Melodrama

Domain	Title
Books	American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (reference) Dickens's Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (reference) Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (reference) Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (reference) Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Approaches to American Culture) (reference) (more book examples)

Theater & Movies	Manhattan Melodrama (reference) (more DVD examples; more video examples)

Music	Enoch Arden (A Melodrama) (reference) Myrmidons of Melodrama [RPM 136] (reference) (more classical music examples; more popular music examples)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Photo Album: Melodrama

Thumbnail	Description & Credit	Thumbnail	Description & Credit
	On the east side melodrama flaunts its eternal lure.Credit: Library of Congress.		Soliloquy of the Minnesota viking in the thrilling Ballinger-Pinchot melodrama -- "shall I whitewash or shall I probe".Credit: Library of Congress.
	Carl A. Haswin in the new romantic melodrama, A lion's heart an honest, earnest production of a great play.Credit: Library of Congress.		A startling melodrama, A ragged hero by Maurice J. Fielding.Credit: Library of Congress.
	A Tammany tiger a melodrama of New York life by H. Grattan Donnelly.Credit: Library of Congress.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Familiar Quotations: Melodrama

Author	Quotation
Elbert Hubbard	One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references.

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Use in Literature: Melodrama

Title	Author	Quote
Les Miserables	Hugo, Victor	Then they began to talk about a melodrama which they had seen the evening before at La Gaite.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references.

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Usage Frequency: Melodrama

"Melodrama" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 99.35% of the time. "Melodrama" is used about 155 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted)

Parts of Speech	Percent	Usage per 100 Million Words	Rank in English
Noun (singular)	99.35%	154	25,326
Noun (proper)	0.65%	1	339,140
Total	100.00%	155	N/A

Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.

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Expressions: Melodrama

Hypenated Usage
	Ending with "melodrama": docu-melodrama, pop-melodrama.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Frequency of Internet Keywords: Melodrama

The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com.

Expression	Frequency per Day
melodrama	71
american great melodrama	11
melodrama mosley street	7
city martin melodrama	4
history melodrama	3
melodrama script	3
melodrama music	3
spontaneous melodrama	3
melodrama oceano	3
melodrama theater	2
definition melodrama	2
christian melodrama	2
victorian melodrama	2
circle diamond melodrama	2
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Modern Translations: Melodrama

Language		Translations for "melodrama"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses.
Albanian		melodramë (thriller), teatralitet. (various references)

Arabic		‏ميلودراما, ‏تمثيلية عاطفية مأساوية, ‏أحداث مثيرة. (various references)

Bulgarian		мелодраматичност, мелодрама (thriller). (various references)

Czech		melodrama. (various references)

Dutch		melodrama. (various references)

Esperanto		melodramo. (various references)

Farsi		عشق خوش فرجام . (various references)

French		mélodrame. (various references)

German		melodrama, Melodram, Singspiel (musical comedy). (various references)

Greek		μελόδραμα (opera). (various references)

Hebrew		מלודרמה. (various references)

Hungarian		melodráma, rémdráma. (various references)

Indonesian		sandiwara sedih. (various references)

Italian		melodramma. (various references)

Japanese Kanji		メル友 (a friend with whom one corresponds by e-mail, a motion, being falling down drunk, maintenance, Mauser, melodious, melody, melon, member, member name, members, member's card, membership, Memphis, Mendel, mendelevium, menses, mensheviki, menswear, mental, mental health, mental test, mentalistic, mentality, menthol, meringue, mince, mince cutlet, mortgage, soap opera). (various references)

Japanese Katakana		メロドラマ (soap opera). (various references)

Pig Latin		elodramamay

Portuguese		melodrama (melodramatic), melodizar. (various references)

Romanian		melodramã (tragicomedy). (various references)

Russian		мелодрама. (various references)

Serbo-Croatian		melodrama. (various references)

Spanish		melodrama. (various references)

Swedish		melodrama. (various references)

Turkish		melodram. (various references)

Ukranian		театральність (staginess), мелодрама (soaper, thriller). (various references)

Vietnamese		lời nói quá thống thiết, lời nói cường điệu (overstatement), kịch mêlô lời nói quá đáng, cử chỉ quá đáng. (various references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references.

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Ancestral Language Translations: Melodrama

Language	Period	Translations
Greek	700 BCE-300 CE	melos. (various references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references.

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Derivations & Misspellings: Melodrama

Derivations
	Words beginning with "melodrama": melodramas, melodramatic, melodramatically, melodramatics, melodramatise, melodramatised, melodramatises, melodramatising, melodramatist, melodramatists, melodramatization, melodramatizations, melodramatize, melodramatized, melodramatizes, melodramatizing. (additional references)
Misspellings
	"Melodrama" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: Maloprim, Melderman, meldorama, meledrama, mellodrama, melodiam, melodramo, mleodrama. (additional references)
Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references).

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Anagrams: Melodrama

Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams
	Words within the letters "a-a-d-e-l-m-m-o-r"
	-2 letters: alamode, alarmed, almemar, armload, earldom.
	-3 letters: amoral, areola, dammar, dammer, dermal, lammed, loader, loamed, madame, marled, medlar, molder, morale, ordeal, radome, rammed, reload, remold, roamed.
	-4 letters: adore, alamo, alarm, alder, amole, areal, armed, aroma, damar, derma, dolma, domal, drama, dream, lader, lamed, lamer, lemma, madam, madre, malar, medal, modal, model, modem, molar, morae.
	Words containing the letters "a-a-d-e-l-m-m-o-r"
	+1 letter: dermatomal, melodramas.
	+3 letters: melodramatic.
	+4 letters: melodramatics, melodramatise, melodramatist, melodramatize.
	+5 letters: melodramatised, melodramatises, melodramatists, melodramatized, melodramatizes.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro.