musical chairs

1. 1.

   a child's game in which players march to music around a group of chairs that contains one chair less than the number of players; when the music abruptly stops the players scramble to sit and the player who does not find a chair is eliminated; then a chair is removed and the march resumes until only the winner is seated

   Synonymsgoing to Jerusalem

   Broaderchild's game
2. 2.

   a rearrangement that has no practical effect or significance

   “the company is looking for stability after years of musical chairs with directors”

   “shareholders don't want the company playing musical chairs with their investment”

   Broaderrearrangement

Questions about musical chairs

What does musical chairs mean?

musical chairs means "a child's game in which players march to music around a group of chairs that contains one chair less than the number of players; when the music abruptly stops the players scramble to sit and the player who does not find a chair is eliminated; then a chair is removed and the march resumes until only the winner is seated". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for musical chairs?

Close synonyms include going to Jerusalem. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is musical chairs a common word?

musical chairs 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.