Music. a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.
Ballet. the concluding section of a ballet, especially the final part of a pas de deux.
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.
anything that serves as a concluding part.
Phonetics. the segment of a syllable following the nucleus, as the d- sound in good.
music the final, sometimes inessential, part of a musical structure
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
First recorded in 1745–55; from Italian, from Latin cauda “tail”; cf. queue
First recorded in 1990–95
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.
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
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
And in the final pages of the “Farewell Address” movement, the work’s brief coda proves moving in its gentle evanescence.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 7, 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
It seemed innocuous, a soft coda to the storm of the morning.
From "Breadcrumbs" by Anne Ursu
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
Meanwhile, romantic film CODA, war film Mincemeat and TV series The Pact have received three nominations each.
From BBC ● Sep. 7, 2022
But easy stories aren't always the best, and stories created for the comfort of a non-disabled audience usually have the self-satisfied ring of inspiration, like "CODA" does.
From Salon ● Apr. 11, 2022
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
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
Beethoven added important introductions or codas, or even both, to some of the movements of his sonatas.
From The Pianoforte Sonata Its Origin and Development by Shedlock, J. S. (John South)
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.
