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A style of dance music that arose in the mid-1970s, disco (short for discotheque), is characterized by hypnotic rhythm, repetitive lyrics, and electronically produced sounds. Disco evolved largely from New York underground nightclubs, in which disc jockeys would play dance records for hours without interruption, taking care to synchronize the beats so as to make a seamless change between records. Artists such as Donna Summer, Chic, and the Bee Gees, had hits in the genre, which peaked with the release of the film Saturday Night Fever (1977). Disco faded after 1980, but its influence, especially its sequenced electronic beats, still affects much of pop music.
Examples of disco in a Sentence
Tara Massouleh McCay, Southern Living, 12 Mar. 2026
That album came after two star-making mixtapes Beat Tape 1 (2014) and Beat Tape 2 (2015) that marked him out as one of British music’s bright young things, a guitarist and songwriter who could flit between jazz, pop, hip-hop and disco and could pull a feature or two (more on those later).
—Thomas Smith, Billboard, 11 Mar. 2026
Minty Mellon, Vogue, 16 Dec. 2025
There were jazz clubs and discos in lofts in SoHo and other places.
—Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone, 13 Aug. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Disco.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disco. Accessed 16 Mar. 2026.
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