Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Performance for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "Performance" — a noun, pronounced /pəˈfɔːməns/, with the stress on "for".
Narrator: A performance is the act of carrying something out, or the standard to which it is carried out.
Narrator: In plain English, it is either a show you give in front of people, or how well something or someone does a job.
Narrator: It comes from the verb to perform, which entered English from Anglo-Norman French parfourmer, meaning to carry through to completion, with the noun ending added later.
Narrator: A very common collocation is performance review, which describes a formal assessment of how well an employee has been working.
Narrator: It differs from achievement, because an achievement is a single result you can point to, while performance is the ongoing quality of the doing itself.
Narrator: We also speak of a live performance, or say that someone put on quite a performance, meaning they made an unnecessary fuss.
Narrator: Theatre, music, sport, business management, engineering and software development all rely on this word every single day.
Narrator: So remember: performance is both the doing and the measure of how well it was done.
Speaker A: Why does one word cover both a ballet and a database?
Speaker B: Because PERFORMANCE comes from old French parfourmer, to carry something right through, and both a dancer and a database are carrying a task through to the end.
Speaker A: So the shared idea is completion rather than applause?
Speaker B: Exactly right, and that is why engineers and actors can use the same word without confusion.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "Her performance as Lady Macbeth was electrifying" — that is a stage show. "The team's performance improved after the new manager arrived" — that is quality of work. "We measure page performance in milliseconds" — that is technical speed.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Spell it with an o in the middle, performance, never performence, and remember it takes no e before the ending. It is countable for shows, two performances tonight, but uncountable when you mean general efficiency.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Execution is the businesslike cousin, presentation is the near twin on stage, and efficiency is the engineer's alternative — yet performance keeps its theatrical charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "performance" in AI prompts — useful for profiling a slow web application and for writing staff appraisal summaries.
Speaker A: How does it apply to a slow website?
Speaker B: Ask the model to audit the front end with speed in mind.
Prompt: Review this React component and list the five changes most likely to improve rendering performance on mobile devices.
Speaker A: What about databases?
Speaker B: Use it to hunt down expensive queries.
Prompt: Analyse this SQL query and explain how indexing could improve its performance on a table of ten million rows.
Speaker A: Can it help with people rather than machines?
Speaker B: Yes, it works beautifully for management writing.
Prompt: Draft a fair and constructive performance review for a junior developer who writes clean code but misses deadlines.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Let's have it set up monitoring.
Prompt: Design a dashboard specification that tracks the key performance metrics of our checkout service, including latency, error rate and throughput.
Performance — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary