Showing results for "coda"

Jump To:

• 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.

SEE ALSO:

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.

---

CODA ² American  

[koh-duh] / ˈkoʊ də /

abbreviation

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

---

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

---

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.”

---

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

It’s really just a sad coda for Bass.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 14, 2026

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

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 30, 2026

They form a coda to Rana Dasgupta’s thought-provoking but rather chaotic book “After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 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

We want to be abundantly clear: The authors of this article are not affiliated with CODA, and their views do not reflect our values.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 20, 2026

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

Four of the past five winners of the top PGA trophy went on to win the Academy Award for best picture, including last year's family drama "CODA."

From Reuters ● Feb. 26, 2023

Her song "Both Sides Now" was the emotional heart of the 2022 Oscar-winning film "CODA."

From Salon ● Jul. 25, 2022

Fernanda Torres’ stunning performance holds the film together with matriarchal love, but it’s the film’s two codas that have left it lingering in my mind for months.

From Salon ● Feb. 28, 2025

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

From Slate ● Dec. 30, 2024

Without understanding what these codas signify, researchers can’t actually know what they might be saying, if anything meaningful at all.

From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2024

Leitao and colleagues aimed to investigate the differences in structure within codas to gain a deeper understanding of the variations in sperm whale communication.

From Science Daily ● May 16, 2024

The Coda, from measure 219, is long and, like codas of Beethoven, has features of a second development.

From Music: An Art and a Language by Walter Raymond Spalding

Random Word

Spin the wheel and learn a new word!

---

Related Words

• afterword
• postscript
• summation

---