Other forms: genres
A genre is one family of art — comedy, horror, crime, jazz, romance. It is a way of sorting films, books and music by the expectations they set up, and the whole point of a genre is that the audience already knows roughly what is coming.
The word is French and still sounds it: ZHON-ruh, with the soft French j at the front, and that pronunciation is worth practising because the spelling gives no help at all. It is used a good deal in criticism and increasingly in ordinary speech about streaming: what genre is it? Note the adjective generic, which comes from the same Latin root but has drifted a long way — generic means without a brand or without character, not belonging to a genre.
1noungenreA style or category of art, writing or music.
“Science fiction is the only genre he reads.”
2adjectivepaintingOf painting, showing ordinary domestic life.
“The gallery has a room of Dutch genre paintings.”
genre is a category of art.
Latin genus meant a kind or a birth — the same word that gives genus in biology, general, generate and gender. French turned it into genre, and English borrowed it back without translating it, which is why it still wears its French clothes.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵenh₁-
Latin
genus
Old French
gendre
French
genre
English, today
genre
French genre, from Old French gendre, borrowed from Latin genus. a doublet of gender and genus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA