Vocabulary·entree

Go to a fancy restaurant and take a look at the menu. If you decide to order the chicken, you've just selected your entree.

Entree, pronounced "ON-tray" and sometimes spelled entrée, is another word for main course, at least as it's usually used in this country. Sometimes people talk about having an entree into society, or into some club. When it's used in those contexts, it usually means you have someone who's going to smooth the way, introduce you, and allow you to enter.

he finishes her entree of scallops too quickly, sits for a very long time, it seems, watching Nikhil work his way through his quail.

It was “a great entree,” she told me, but it only brought her so far into their world.

“The entree,” he continued, “consists of boiled dog, stuffed with rice.”

It is his birthday, and Hugh and I are seated in a New York restaurant, awaiting the arrival of our fifteen-word entrees.

The opera that evening — sung, not acted, so as not to oflend the sensibilites of the town — was a Peruvian love story, an entree by Monsieur Rameau.

Blacks were ghettoed into separate bathrooms, but they had also been given an unprecedented entree into the professional world.

Knowing a bit of grammar also gives a writer an entree into the world of letters.

When the waiter brings our entrees, I have no idea which plate might be mine.