tableau
Other forms: tableaux; tableaus
A tableau is a dramatic picture. If you catch a glance into the Oval Office and see top advisers speaking to each other with intensity, you behold a dramatic political tableau.
Tableau comes from the old French for "picture, or painted target." We usually use tableau to describe a vivid living scene. If you are a journalist and want to describe the tension in a courtroom, you might write a verbal tableau of the judge, the jury, and the witness box. People used to entertain themselves by doing tableau vivant, or living pictures, by reenacting perfectly the frozen scene of a famous painting.
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any dramatic scene
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a group of people attractively arranged (as if in a painting)synonyms: tableau vivanttype of:arrangementan orderly grouping (of things or persons) considered as a unit; the result of arranging
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Vocabulary lists containing tableau
This dramatic adaptation of the diary of a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis won both a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Jay Aubrey Jones pronounced more than 36,000 words for Vocabulary.com (including laurel). Here are some of the most esoteric. See if you can spell them while listening to the dulcet tones of Jay's voice!
In this dystopian novel, America is a totalitarian theocracy in which young women are conscripted to serve the political elite.