Definition
1. Hospitality and Board. In its foundational legal sense, entertainment means the provision of food, lodging, and the ordinary necessaries of life to a guest or traveler. Historical courts treated this sense as synonymous with "board," giving it significance in innkeeper law, liability for guests, and claims for necessaries.
2. Refreshment and Accommodation. A broader sense, developed in English licensing and hospitality law, extends entertainment to encompass the enjoyment of refreshment rooms, tables, and related amenities — whether or not musical or other amusements are included. Under this sense, entertainment is something beyond mere refreshments; it is the accommodation provided in connection with them.
3. Amusement and Public Performance. In modern legal usage, entertainment most commonly refers to activities, performances, or exhibitions designed to amuse, divert, or provide pleasure to an audience. This sense governs licensing law, zoning classifications, intellectual property, labor and guild agreements, immigration classifications, and tax treatment of entertainment expenses. A public aquarium where a band plays and fish are fed has been held to qualify as a "place of entertainment and amusement" under this sense.
4. Employment and Service (Archaic). An older, now largely obsolete legal sense encompasses the act of receiving a person into service — the engagement or hiring of a servant or soldier — along with the payment or wages associated with that employment relationship. This sense survives mainly in historical sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "An activity designed to give pleasure, enjoyment, diversion, amusement, or relaxation to an audience, no matter whether the audience participates passively as in watching opera or a movie, or actively as in games."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of receiving as host, or of amusing, admitting, or cherishing; hospitable reception... Hospitality; hospitable provision for the wants of a guest."
The common language captures the amusement sense well, but misses the legal significance of the hospitality and board sense entirely. A researcher encountering "entertainment" in a nineteenth-century innkeeper case, a claim for necessaries, or a licensing dispute over refreshment rooms should not read the term through a modern amusement-industry lens. The hospitality sense carries distinct legal duties and liabilities that the popular definition does not suggest.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Place of Entertainment: A licensing and zoning category covering venues where amusement or performance is offered to the public. The classification determines regulatory obligations, permit requirements, and sometimes liability exposure. Courts have construed the phrase broadly to include aquariums, public halls, and similar venues not traditionally associated with theatrical performance.
Entertainment Expenses: A tax category subject to heightened scrutiny and, in U.S. federal law, significant deductibility restrictions. The treatment of business entertainment expenses has shifted substantially by statute and is a distinct research area from the general term.
Entertainment Industry Contracts: A specialized field of contract law governing talent agreements, guild and union agreements (SAG-AFTRA, WGA, DGA, and others), licensing, and distribution deals. Standard terms in these agreements carry industry-specific meanings that diverge from general contract doctrine.
Entertainment Visa Classifications: Immigration law creates dedicated nonimmigrant visa categories for performers, athletes, and entertainers, each with specific evidentiary and petitioning requirements. See Encyclopedia cross-reference below.
Why It Matters in Research
The term's meaning shifts dramatically depending on era, jurisdiction, and legal context. A researcher must identify which sense is operative before drawing on secondary sources or analogous authority.
In historical sources, the dominant legal meaning is hospitality and board, not amusement. Cases citing entertainment in the context of innkeeper liability, necessaries doctrine, or licensing of public houses are using the term in Sense 1 or 2. Importing the modern amusement-industry meaning into those sources produces misreadings.
In modern primary sources, entertainment appears across multiple discrete practice areas — each with its own regulatory framework, statutory definitions, and case law. Zoning and licensing law defines "place of entertainment" for local regulatory purposes; that definition may or may not track the immigration law definition of entertainment activity, which in turn may not track the tax code's definition of entertainment expenses. Researchers should not assume that a favorable definition in one area of law controls in another.
The employment-and-service sense (Sense 4) appears in Bouvier and Anderson in contexts involving domestic servants and military pay. It is effectively dead in modern usage but can mislead a researcher reading older statutory text or treatises that use "entertainment of servants" as a term of art for hiring.
For immigration researchers, the P and Q visa categories create a formal administrative definition of entertainer and entertainment that controls eligibility determinations. The Encyclopedia entry on P Visas and related categories provides navigational context for that regulatory framework.
For intellectual property researchers, entertainment connects to rights of publicity, performance rights, synchronization licenses, and the distinction between live performance and recorded media — each governed by different legal regimes.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the hospitality-and-board sense as the core legal meaning, with Bouvier offering the most nuanced treatment. Bouvier draws the critical distinction between mere refreshments and entertainment proper: entertainment requires the accommodation associated with refreshment — the room and table — and extends to include musical or other amusements when provided, without requiring them. This accords with the English licensing cases Bouvier cites (L.R. 10 Q.B. 595; 1 Ex. Div. 385) and with the Pennsylvania authority (2 Miles 323) cited uniformly across Black's (both editions) and Bouvier for the synonymy with board.
Anderson extends the term to the public amusement sense, noting that a public aquarium qualifies as a place of entertainment and amusement when a band plays — a practical illustration of how courts were already stretching the term toward its modern meaning by the late nineteenth century. Anderson's cross-references to INN, EXHIBITION, and THEATER signal the overlapping regulatory terrain.
What the historical dictionaries miss almost entirely is the entertainment-as-employment sense found in Wiktionary's older definitions. The admission-into-service meaning and the wages sense do not appear prominently in any of the shelf sources, suggesting either that this usage was more common in English law than in American practice, or that it had already faded from legal significance by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
No historical dictionary anticipates the modern industry-specific meanings — entertainment contracts, entertainment law as a practice area, or immigration classifications for entertainers — which are products of twentieth- and twenty-first-century statutory and regulatory development.
Jurisdictional Note
Definitions of "place of entertainment" for licensing and zoning purposes vary significantly by state and municipality; what qualifies in one jurisdiction may not in another, and local ordinances often control. Federal law supplies specific definitions for entertainment expenses (tax) and entertainment-based visa categories (immigration) that operate independently of state-law classifications.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Immigration Law Encyclopedia — P Visas (Athletes/Entertainers), Q Cultural Exchange, and Other Specialty Categories