social dancing
1
3.2
- noun
- /ˈsoʊʃəl ˈdænsɪŋ/
:
baile social
- At the wedding reception, everyone enjoyed social dancing after the ceremony.
Examples
-
That was the only form of social dancing the church encouraged on its premises or elsewhere.
Academic text (2000) -
Social dancing ensued following the presented program.
Academic text (2016) -
The setting for cultural display moved further toward the social in character, from the community hall stage to a new restaurant specializing in large group events, and as a result, genuine social dancing broke out during the display with the invited Romanian dancers mixing with the Hungarians.
Academic text (2016) -
If the beginning of my dancing life was the savage, separate cavorting of some boys and girls in my seventh-grade classroom, this was the most civilized version of social dancing I had ever witnessed.
Fiction book (1991) -
During the community festival, people gathered to partake in social dancing under the stars.
-
The local club hosts a night dedicated to social dancing, where friends can gather and have fun.
Synonyms
758
1.0
Moving your body in time to music for fun with other people
Antonyms
How Formal
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and compositionally derived from 'social' (relating to communal or group interaction) + 'dancing' (engaging in rhythmic movement to music), so it denotes dancing that takes place in social gatherings. This Adj+Noun pattern is cross-linguistically common and follows normal English composition rules, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the intended meaning (the not-for-performance nuance is contextual but does not block comprehension).
Etymology
The term social dancing comes from people at parties, weddings, or community halls where social means being with others and dancing means moving to music to enjoy each other's company. So social dancing means dancing at a gathering to have fun and meet people, not 'for a show' or 'for a competition'.