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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

The poignant “Time Waits for No One” features one of Taylor’s most beautiful solos, a fitting coda to the end of his five-year career with the Stones.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 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

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

What is the code of normalcy before it becomes corrupted by cancer’s coda?

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

The writer/director of "CODA," Sian Heder, was among the many who praised Kotsur's empathetic performance as well where he "absolutely killed it."

From Salon ● Feb. 13, 2023

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

From BBC ● Sep. 7, 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

“These codas were more about bonding,” Whitehead said, when asked what kinds of messages sperm whales might be sending to one another.

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

Schubert, in the importance of his codas, recalls Beethoven; each, however, made it serve a different purpose.

From The Pianoforte Sonata Its Origin and Development by J. S. (John South) Shedlock

Related Words

• afterword
• postscript
• summation