Meaning
Originally, a song or number so well received that the applause forces the show to pause while the audience is quieted; now anything outstandingly effective, from a gown to a product feature. In business and engineering jargon the word turns ironic: a showstopper is a problem serious enough to halt a project entirely. Complimentary in everyday use; in technical and business registers it is neutral or negative, naming a blocking problem. Regional use: General English (American theatrical origin).
Origin
The phrase beneath the compound, 'to stop the show', was 19th-century theatrical press language for an act that won such prolonged applause the performance had to wait it out; reviews of the 1885 Savoy run of The Mikado already describe numbers 'stopping the show'. The compound noun belongs to the 1910s-20s: Merriam-Webster gives a first known use of 1916, while Etymonline dates 'show-stopper', 'an act that wins so much applause as to pause the show', by 1926, a typical spread between dictionaries' citation files. It is an American theatrical coinage of the vaudeville and Broadway era. The laudatory general sense ('the dress was a showstopper') and the reversed obstacle sense developed later in the 20th century, though neither source pins a date to those extensions, so they are best treated as undocumented-but-evident developments.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a real showstopper
- stop the show
Usage Examples
- The eleven o'clock number is a genuine showstopper; on opening night the applause lasted two full minutes.
- That crimson gown was the showstopper of the whole evening.
- Legal ownership of the data turned out to be the showstopper that killed the merger.