Scenario
/səˈnɛərioʊ/noun
An outline of a possible sequence of events, or the plot summary of a film or play.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of the stage tent”
The story of the word
σκηνή was the hut behind the acting area where actors changed masks, and it gave Latin scaena, the stage, and then the painted scene on it. Italian scenario meant the plot outline pinned up backstage for commedia dell'arte players, who improvised everything else. English borrowed that theatrical sense in the 1860s, and the meaning it carries now, an imagined sequence of events, was fixed around 1960 by Herman Kahn and the RAND analysts modelling nuclear war.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Italian → English
- First recorded
- 1860s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
They ran the worst-case scenario twice and stopped talking about it afterwards.
Give me the scenario in four lines before you write a word of dialogue.