Word.ws English Dictionary

well-made plays

well-made plays is the plural of well-made play.

Meaning of well-made play

Noun

well-made play (plural well-made plays)

  1. A play belonging to a 19th-century neoclassical theatrical genre involving a tight plot and a climax close to the end. The story depends upon a key piece of information kept from some characters, and moves forward in a chain of actions that use minor reversals of fortune to create suspense.
    • Ultimately Ibsen denies the basic philosophy of the well-made play, that there is meaning and progress in time, and that all human beings are rational creatures, subject to the reassuring process of cause and effect.1983, George Stade, European Writers: The Romantic century, Charles Baudelaire to the well-made play, Scribner, →ISBN

Questions about well-made plays

What is well-made plays the plural of?
Well-made plays is the plural of well-made play.

Words near well-made plays in the dictionary

  1. well-lit
  2. well-looked
  3. well-loved
  4. well-made
  5. well-made play
  6. well-made plays
  7. well-mannered
  8. well-matched
  9. well-meaner
  10. well-meaners
  11. well-meaning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: well-made plays (page history and authors); well-made play (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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