Other forms: festivals
A festival is a celebration big enough to fill a place for days — three stages of music, food vans, a field of tents and boots. Or the town's own one: a saint's day, a procession, stalls the whole length of the main street.
The word covers three sorts of thing. There are the music and arts festivals you buy a ticket and a wristband for; religious festivals, the fixed holy days of the year — Diwali, Passover, Easter, Eid; and the harvest, film and beer festivals a town puts on for a weekend. Festive is the adjective, and it belongs to the mood rather than the event: festive lights, a festive mood, and in Britain the festive season means Christmas. You are at a festival while you are there, and it is the festival of something when you name it. The people who go are festival-goers.
1nounfestivalA large public celebration held over several days, with music, food and crowds.~45%
“They camped at the festival for four nights.”
2nounreligiousA yearly religious celebration of a holy day or a sacred event.~15%
“The spring festival brings the whole family home.”
3nounrunA run of performances or screenings of one art, held in one place.~40%
“The film festival shows two hundred films in ten days.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 170 sentences found in the wild and placed 164 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Festival began as an adjective. Old French festival meant festive, from Latin fēstīvus, and English said festival day where we would say feast day. Then the day fell off the end and the adjective was left standing there as a noun. It arrived and pushed out the older native word for the same thing, frēols.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁-
Latin
fēstīvālis
Old French
festival — festive
Middle English
festival
English, today
festival
Built from
From Middle English festival, from Old French festival (“festive”), from Latin fēstīvālis, from Latin fēstīvus (“festive”). by surface analysis, festive + -al. Displaced native frēols. The noun is shortened from festival day, from festival dai, festiuall day (“feast day, festival”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA