stage

Definitions

General English

  • noun a raised floor,

    especially

    where the actors

    perform

    in a

    theatre

  • noun a section of a long

    journey

  • verb to

    put on

    or

    arrange

    a play, a show, a

    musical

    or

    other

    performance or

    event

Aviation

  • noun a group components forming part of an electrical or

    electronic

    system

Banking

  • noun a period, one of several points in a process of

    development

Electronics

  • A

    component

    or

    functional unit

    within a circuit, device, piece of

    equipment

    , or system. For example, an

    amplifier stage

    , an intermediate-frequency stage, an

    oscillator stage

    , or a

    mixer

    stage.

Medical

  • noun a point in the

    development

    of a

    disease

    at which a decision can be taken about the

    treatment

    which should be given or at which distinctive developments

    take

    place

Origin & History of “stage”

A stage (

like

a stable) is etymologically a ‘standing-place’. The word comes via Old French estage

from

vulgar

Latin *staticum ‘standing-place, position’, a derivative of Latin stāre ‘stand’ (to

which

English

stand is distantly related). By the time it arrived in English it had acquired the additional connotation of a ‘set of positions one

above

the other’, and

this

led to its use in the

more

concrete

senses ‘storey, floor’ and ‘raised platform’. The specific application to a ‘platform in a theatre’ emerged in the mid-16th century. The sense ‘section of a journey’ (on which stagecoach (17th c.) is based) developed at the end of the 16th century, presumably on the analogy of physical levels succeeding one another in ‘steps’ or ‘tiers’; and the

further

metaphoricization to ‘step in development’ took place in the 19th century.
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