Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A slow, stately pattern dance in 3/4 time for groups of couples, originating in 17th-century France.
  • noun The music for this dance.
  • noun A movement in 3/4 time that is usually the third, but sometimes the second, of a four-movement symphony or string quartet.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A slow and graceful dance, invented, probably in Poitou, France, about the middle of the seventeenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century it was “he most popular of the more stately and ceremonious dances.
  • noun Music for such a dance, or in its rhythm, which is triple and slow.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A slow graceful dance consisting of a coupee, a high step, and a balance.
  • noun (Mus.) A tune or air to regulate the movements of the dance so called; a movement in suites, sonatas, symphonies, etc., having the dance form, and commonly in 3-4, sometimes 3-8, measure.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A slow graceful dance consisting of a coupé, a high step, and a balance.
  • noun music A tune or air to regulate the movements of the minuet dance: it has the dance form, and is commonly in 3/4, sometimes 3/8, measure.
  • noun music A complete short musical composition inspired by and conforming to many formal characteristics of the traditional musical accompaniment to the dance of same name.
  • noun music A movement which is part of a longer musical composition such as a suite, sonata, or symphony which is inspired by and conforming to formal characteristics of the dance of same name.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a stately piece of music composed for dancing the minuet; often incorporated into a sonata or suite
  • noun a stately court dance in the 17th century

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French menuet, from Old French, small, dainty (from the small steps characteristic of the dance), diminutive of menu, small, from Latin minūtus; see minute.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French menuet, from menu ("small") + et ("diminutive"), from Latin minutus ("very small")

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Examples

Comments

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  • Nice when used unconventionally, as in a "conversational minuet"

    March 31, 2008

  • The stately part of the official definition is misleading: a characteristic that the minuet acquired in the 19th century after everybody had stopped dancing it. The problem is most people of later periods, thinking of the minuet as graceful, have also assumed that it was slow, when in fact it was recommended that it be "played springily" (Johann Joachim Quantz, 1788).

    March 31, 2008

  • "By late September, the president, now campaigning for Congress to give him his bailout package, was warning that we could otherwise indeed 'experience a long and painful recession.' But well into October, White House press spokesperson Dana Perino still responded to a question about whether we were in a recession by insisting, 'You know I don't think that we know.'

    Lest you imagine that this no-recession verbal minuet was simply a typical administration prevarication operation, for much of the year top newspapers (and the TV news) essentially agreed to agree."

    - Tom Engelhardt, 'The Day the Earth Still Stood:

    What Will Obama Inherit?', tomdispatch.com, 20 January 2009.

    January 21, 2009