Fair

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A fair (archaic: faire or fayre) is a gathering of people for a variety of entertainment or commercial activities. Fairs are typically temporary with scheduled times lasting from an afternoon to several weeks. Fairs showcase a wide range of goods, products, and services, and often include competitions, exhibitions, and educational activities. Fairs can be thematic, focusing on specific industries or interests.^[1]

Variations of fairs include:

• Art fairs, including art exhibitions and arts festivals
• Book Fairs in communities and schools provide an opportunity for readers, writers, publishers to come together and celebrate literature.
• County fair (USA) or county show (UK), a public agricultural show
  exhibiting the equipment, animals, sports and recreation associated with agriculture and animal husbandry.
• Festival, an event ordinarily coordinated with a theme e.g. music, art, season, tradition, history, ethnicity, religion, or a national holiday.
• Health fair, an event designed for outreach to provide basic preventive medicine and medical screening
• Historical reenactments, including Renaissance fairs and Dickens fairs
• Horse fair, an event where people buy and sell horses.
• Job fair, event in which employers, recruiters, and schools give information to potential employees.
• Regional or state fair, an annual competitive and recreational gathering. Including exhibits or competitors that have won in their categories at the local fairs.
• Science fair, a competitive event for entries employ the scientific method to test a hypothesis.
• A town/city's street fair or market, including charter fairs, celebrates character of a neighborhood and local merchants.
• Temple fair or miaohui, yearly fair held in temples of various religions
• Trade fair
  , an exhibition organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products and services, study activities of rivals, and examine recent market trends and opportunities.
• Traveling funfair or carnival, an amusement show made up of amusement rides, food vending stalls, merchandise vending stalls, games of "chance and skill", thrill acts and (now less commonly) animal acts.
• Village fair or fête, an elaborate periodic festival, party or celebration. Held by the locals to original to celebrate a good harvests or religious gatherings.
• World's fair, an international exhibition designed to showcase achievements of nations

The

In the United States, fairs draw in as many as 150 million people each summer.[7] Children's competitions at an American fair range from breeding small animals to robotics, whilst the organizations National FFA Organization & 4-H have become the traditional associations.^[7]

The Sirsi Marikamba Devi Fair of the deity is held every alternate year in the month of March and taken through the city Sirsi, Karnataka. It is attended by a very large number of devotees. It is also most famous and biggest fair (Jaatre) of the India. Devotees from all around the state participate in this enormous event indulging themselves in the procession. Amusements for children, circuses, variety of shops, dramas and plays and many such things are set up for the people. It depicts the story of the goddess killing Mahishasura.

Fairs attracted great numbers of people and they often resulted in public order issues and sometimes riots. The holding of fairs was, therefore, granted by royal charter. Initially they were only allowed in towns and places where order could be maintained due to the presence of a bishop, sheriff or governor. Later various benefits were granted to specific fairs, such as the granting of a holiday status to a fair or protections against arrest for specific laws for the duration of the fair. Officials were authorised to mete out justice to those who attended their fair; this led to even the smallest fair having a court to adjudicate on offences and disputes arising within the fairground. These courts were called a pye powder court (from Old French pieds pouldres, literally "dusty feet", meaning an itinerant trader, from Medieval Latin pedes pulverosi).

The chaotic nature of the Stagshaw Bank Fair with masses of people and animals and stalls inspired the Newcastle colloquialism "like a Stagey Bank Fair" to describe a general mess.^[3]

The American

• Art exhibition
• Convention
• China fairing (a small porcelain ornament, so named because they were given away as prizes at fairs in the Victorian era)
• Lists of festivals