absurd [M16th] One sense of the Latin word absurdus was ‘out of tune’, and in the past absurd was occasionally used with this meaning. From this Latin sense it developed the meaning ‘out of harmony with reason, irrational’. The term Theatre of the Absurd, describing drama by writers such as Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Eugène Ionesco (1904–1994), and Harold Pinter (1930–2008), was coined by the critic Martin Esslin (1918–2002) in 1961.