curtain raiser

1. 1.

   any preliminary activity

   Broaderfirst step
2. 2.

   a short play presented before the main play

   Broaderplay

Questions about curtain raiser

What does curtain raiser mean?

curtain raiser means "any preliminary activity". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is curtain raiser a common word?

curtain raiser is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.