finale

American  

[fi-nal-ee, -nah-lee] / fɪˈnæl i, -ˈnɑ li /

noun

• finales
  plural

1. the last piece, division, or movement of a concert, opera, or composition.

2. the concluding part of any performance, course of proceedings, etc.; end.

---

finale British  

/ fɪˈnɑːlɪ /

noun

1. the concluding part of any performance or presentation

2. the closing section or movement of a musical composition

---

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• finales
  plural

Etymology

Origin of finale

1715–25; < Italian, noun use of finale (adj.) < Latin fīnālis final

Explanation

If you decide to leave the theater early to beat traffic, you’ll miss the finale — the exciting final part of a theatrical performance. Perhaps to ensure that audience members stay until the end, many musical and theatrical pieces end with an elaborate flourish known as the finale. (If it’s truly spectacular, it might even be called a “grand finale.”) Appropriately, the pronunciation of finale contains a final flourish that you just can’t miss: the letter e, which you might expect to be silent, is pronounced. The last two syllables of finale rhyme with alley.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

finale finales

The nail-biting finale saw the two pairs jumping on an extraction plane from a beach in north Wales, narrowly escaping the hunters.

From BBC ● Aug. 28, 2026

The arm-wrestling will kick off in earnest at a Brussels summit in October, with a likely second meeting in November, before a grand finale in December when leaders will look to seal the deal.

From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026

Curry flexed his versatile acting through more than Frank-N-Furter’s showy elevator debut and his vulnerable “I’m Going Home” finale.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 26, 2026

The team finale, LIV’s signature event, had been scheduled to tee off in Michigan later this month.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 22, 2026

When Haley crawled through the window frame, someone in the crowd that had gathered around the library for the game’s big finale saw her and started screaming.

From "Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library" by Chris Grabenstein

No matter the strengths of AI, a chatbot cannot dream up stories with flawed characters and themes and arcs and failures and triumphs—with ambiguous finales.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026

But the ones I found most interesting were finales I don’t remember encountering in Baseball Digest.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 2026

For more than a decade, “Saturday Night Live” writers Colin Jost and Michael Che have marked breaks and finales with a joke swap segment.

From Salon ● May 17, 2026

I’m curious, Mary, as someone who has watched your share of series finales, how you felt about this conclusion and whether it served that mission.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 14, 2025

He rarely showed up when a particular movie was about to begin, so he’d seen beginnings, finales, and middles of dozens of movies, but hardly any in their entirety.

From "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho" by Jon Katz

Related Words

• climax
• conclusion
• denouement