Entertaining means amusing and enjoyable to watch. An entertaining match, highly entertaining, entertaining company.
It is praise without being praise for quality — an entertaining film may be a bad one, and everybody knows it. As a noun, entertaining means having people to your house, which is a different and rather formal use.
1adjectiveentertainingAmusing and enjoyable to watch.
“The film was entertaining, with lots of jokes and car chases.”
entertaining is a quality.
Proto-Indo-European
*ten-
Latin
inter
Old French
entretenir
Middle French
entretenir
Middle English
entertenen
English
entertain
English, today
entertaining
Built from
From entertain + -ing. entertain comes from Middle English entertenen, from Middle French entretenir, from Old French entretenir, from entre (“among”) + tenir (“to hold”), from Latin inter + teneō (“hold, keep”). For the noun, compare French entretien. Sense of answering a phone call in Malaysian English is influenced by Malay layan “to serve, to attend to or engage with something”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA