Properly, repertory is a style of a number of repertory companies which rehearsed and performed plays in a fortnight. Originally a British idea, these were professionals but due to time restraints and commercial restraints they played like amateurs. The largest repertory theatre company was and still is in Liverpool.

There was a form of touring repertory called fit-up which involved carting round the set for about five different plays. The plays were shown on consecutive nights.

Nowadays repertories perform just once or twice a year.

However the producer Charles Vance still produces weekly rep in Sidmouth (12 plays), Wolverhampton (8 plays), Burslem and Taunton (4 each).

The term is used in the theatre to refer to any number of two or more plays which are rotated within a season, usually alternating with different plays every night for a period of time. Plays are rehearsed all at once or in rapid succession, and often feature the same actors or company in several plays.

The homeopathic repertory is a publication that lists in systematic fashion, all symptoms, signs and modalities as they relate to the application of homeopathic remedies. The first "repertory" of the homeopathic materia medica was arranged by the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hannemann, an eighteenth century german physican and chemist. The most famous homeopathic repertory was compiled by James Tyler Kent, MD, one of the major contributors to homeopathic science and philosophy at the later part of the nineteeth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. [see The Science of Homeopathy by George Vithoulkas, ISBN 0-8021-5120-5, Grove Press 1980]

See also summer stock.

Fringe theatre and community theatre are, though mostly unpaid, similar to repertory.