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• coda
  coda

  noun

  a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.
• CODA
  CODA

  abbreviation

  child of deaf adultadults: a hearing person with a deaf parent or parents.

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Acronyms dictionary results for coda.

coda

¹ American  

[koh-duh] / ˈkoʊ də /

noun

• codas
  plural

1. Music. a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.

2. Ballet. the concluding section of a ballet, especially the final part of a pas de deux.

3. a concluding section or part, especially one of a conventional form and serving as a summation of preceding themes, motifs, etc., as in a work of literature or drama.

4. anything that serves as a concluding part.

5. Phonetics. the segment of a syllable following the nucleus, as the d- sound in good.

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CODA ² American  

[koh-duh] / ˈkoʊ də /

abbreviation

1. child of deaf adultadults: a hearing person with a deaf parent or parents.

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coda British  

/ ˈkəʊdə /

noun

1. music the final, sometimes inessential, part of a musical structure

2. a concluding part of a literary work, esp a summary at the end of a novel of further developments in the lives of the characters

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coda Cultural  

1. An ending to a piece of music, standing outside the formal structure of the piece. Coda is the Italian word for “tail.”

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• codas
  plural

Etymology

Origin of coda¹

First recorded in 1745–55; from Italian, from Latin cauda “tail”; cf. queue

Origin of CODA²

First recorded in 1990–95

Explanation

A coda is a concluding segment of a piece of music, a dance, or a statement. It's usually short and adds a final embellishment beyond a natural ending point. Like this. Coda comes from the Latin word cauda, meaning "tail," and it's good to think of it as a tail tacked onto something that in and of itself is already a whole. If you tell a story about your crazy experience getting lost in the country and sleeping at a farmer's house, you might add, as a coda, that the farmer ended up visiting you too, a year later.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

coda CODA codas

Before the unfortunate coda to their story, Chapman and her brother seemed to be the perfect example of reconciliation.

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 30, 2026

And an unnecessary coda that comes after the curtain call never should have made it out of rehearsals.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 1, 2026

The Netflix series gets a feature-film coda starring Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan, following the Shelby family as it becomes entangled in a German plan to destabilize the British economy.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 19, 2026

The verdict put a coda on a long-running legal saga that raised questions about safety standards at training sessions for police officers.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 19, 2026

The advertising agency and the tobacco company were delighted by the unpaid publicity and were only too happy to confess to the error in the coda, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?”

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

Streamers have also gradually gained wider acceptance at the Academy Awards, where Apple won best picture for "CODA" in 2022.

From Barron's ● Dec. 17, 2025

After thinly slicing and staining tissue from 38 normal pancreatic samples onto hundreds of sequential 2D slides, the researchers developed CODA, a machine-learning pipeline, to analyze and reconstruct the slide images into digital 3D images.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 18, 2024

Also joining in the pre-game entertainment just before kickoff was country superstar Chris Stapleton singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," while "CODA" Oscar winner Troy Kotsur interpreted in ASL.

From Salon ● Feb. 14, 2023

Meanwhile, romantic film CODA, war film Mincemeat and TV series The Pact have received three nominations each.

From BBC ● Sep. 7, 2022

And while Netflix has had several Academy Award nominations in the past, Apple became the first streaming company to win a Best Picture Oscar for "CODA".

From Reuters ● Apr. 18, 2022

Sperm whales use a series of clicks, called codas, to communicate.

From Salon ● May 29, 2025

Two very quick codas to what you’re saying, Mark.

From Slate ● Dec. 30, 2024

According to Hal Whitehead, who has pioneered research on social organization and cultural transmission in deep-water whales since the 1970s, researchers began studying sperm whale codas by comparing them to Morse code.

From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2024

Sperm whales communicate through rhythmic patterns of clicks called codas.

From Science Daily ● May 16, 2024

Sonnet: common rhythm, but with hurried feet: two codas.

From Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Now First Published by Robert Seymour Bridges

Related Words

• afterword
• postscript
• summation