Scene - seen

The homophones scene and seen can be confused, mostly through careless typing. A spellchecker is unlikely to catch such errors, so you should be sure that you can.

• The noun a scene comes from drama. As far back as classical Greek literature, a scene was the stage on which plays were acted. Gradually it came to be restricted to the semi-permanent items on the stage which served to create the illusion that the action of the play was taking place in a real particular setting - backcloths, or artificial 'house', or the appearance of the interior of a room. The general noun for all of this is scenery, spelled the same way. The idea of scene has been applied in several figurative senses, mostly to real life: the police, for example, talk of the scene of [the] crime to mean the place where it happened.
  • Very commonly, the figurative meaning is applied to moments when people are felt to be behaving ads if giving a public performance: when he told his friend that he wouldn't after all go on the trip that had been arranged, she made a scene means that she expressed her anger in a very public way, designed to attract the attention of anyone nearby to what a bad person he was. A small child may sometimes make (or create) a scene, hoping to embarrass a parent into giving him what he wants. A scene of this sort is most often one of rage or anger. While people may 'play' (or act) a love scene, third parties do not usually witness it in normal life, although love scenes commonly appear in films.
• seen is the past participle of the verb 'to see'.

To combine the two: "I have seen Hamlet. I found the scene where Ophelia's death is reported to be particularly moving."