suite / swēt/ • n. 1. a set of things belonging together, in particular: ∎  a set of rooms designated for one person's or family's use or for a particular purpose. ∎  a set of furniture of the same design. ∎  Mus. a set of instrumental compositions, originally in dance style, to be played in succession. ∎  Mus. a set of selected pieces from an opera or musical, arranged to be played as one instrumental work. ∎  Comput. a set of programs with a uniform design and the ability to share data. ∎  Geol. a group of minerals, rocks, or fossils occurring together and characteristic of a location or period.2. a group of people in attendance on a monarch or other person of high rank.

suite (Fr., Eng.; Old Fr. ordre; Old Eng. lesson; Old Ger. Partita or Partia; Old It. sonata da camera). A following. Orig. a piece of instr. mus. in several movts., usually in dance-style. During 17th and 18th cents. was one of most important forms of instr. mus. During Baroque period, typical suite would have framework of allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, with frequent interpolations of minuet, gavotte, passepied, bourrée, musette, and rigaudon. The various movts. were usually based on one key, though modulations occurred within individual movts. Nearly all movts. were in simple binary form. Fr. kbd. suites sometimes contained up to 18 movts., but these were not necessarily all intended to be perf. at once: the composer left it to the player to make a selection. In importance the suite was superseded by the sonata and the sym., and the title was given to works of a lighter type, e.g. Grieg's Holberg and Elgar's Wand of Youth Suites, and assemblages of movts. from opera or ballet scores, e.g. Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé suites. 20th-cent. neo-classic composers revived the term (Stravinsky for example).

Suite

a connected series of items; a retinue of attendants. See also set, staff.

Examples : suite of childish amusements, 1770; of apartments, 1858; English authors, 1824; of crystals, 1805; of tree sparrow’s eggs, 1864; of letters, 1761; of minerals; of musical pieces; of computer programmes—Ponton, 1984; of rooms, 1716; of shells, 1833; of fair white teeth, 1845; of trumps, 1850; of woe, 1602.

suite Musical form, popular in the Baroque period, comprising a number of instrumental dances, which differ in metre, tempo and rhythm but are generally all in the same key. The earliest suites date from the 16th century, and usually involved only two dances, the pavane and galliard. By the 18th century, the dances had become standardized: a prelude, allemande, courante, saraband, and gigue. There was some flexibility, and the minuet, gavotte, bourrée, and rondeau were often added.

suite
A. train of attendants XVII;

B. succession, series XVIII;

C. set of rooms XVIII, of furniture XIX. — F. suite; see SUIT. Sense C is of English development.