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say it: OH-vur-chur
overture is a noun meaning "orchestral music played at the beginning of an opera or oratorio". It carries 3 recorded senses.
orchestral music played at the beginning of an opera or oratorio
something that serves as a preceding event or introduces what follows
“training is a necessary preliminary to employment”
“drinks were the overture to dinner”
a tentative suggestion designed to elicit the reactions of others
“she rejected his advances”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for overture come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.