curtain line
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of curtain line
First recorded in 1935–40
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Audiences, actors, directors, everyone pressed Shaw to give the play a happy ending — the actress he had written Eliza for rebelled and wrote her own cutesy curtain line — but Shaw wouldn’t budge.
From New York Times • Mar. 27, 2018
What Ben doesn’t know, he tells us in the curtain line, “would fill a book”: he is a blank slate whose life in some way is only now beginning.
From New York Times • Apr. 5, 2011
This time, the curtain line was his: “Nobody’s perfect.”
From New York Times • Sep. 30, 2010
Max Beerbohm once concocted a curtain line for which there was no play: "I'm leaving for the Thirty Years' War!"
From Time Magazine Archive
The Prologue, Scenes II, IV, V, the first part of Scene VII and the Epilogue were all played before a plain velvet drop hung a few feet upstage of the curtain line.
From Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays by Various
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
