Word.ws English Dictionary

cliff-hanger

cliff-hanger is the alternative form of cliffhanger.

Meaning of cliffhanger

Noun

cliffhanger (plural cliffhangers)

  1. An ending or stopping point calculated to leave a story unresolved, in order to create suspense.
    • Back in the early 80s, the hit series Dallas kept the nation guessing with its season-ending cliffhanger "Who Shot J.R.?"2007 July 2, Hilary Hylton, “Filming Texas in a Good Light”, in Time, archived from the original on 15 Mar 2009
    Antonyms:
    anticlimax
  2. (broadly) An outcome which is awaited with keen anticipation, especially one which is delayed for a period of time or which is not known until the last minute.
    • This presidential election is such a cliffhanger. Will it be the rising star Dmitry "Obamovich" Medvedev? Or the veteran Gennady "McCainovich" Zyuganov?February 28 2008, Timothy Garton Ash, “Russia has run rings round the west”, in Guardian, retrieved 02 Feb 2009

Forms of cliff-hanger

pluralcliff-hangers

Questions about cliff-hanger

What is cliff-hanger the alternative form of?
Cliff-hanger is the alternative form of cliffhanger.

Words near cliff-hanger in the dictionary

  1. Cliff's Notes versions
  2. cliff-bound
  3. cliff-cave
  4. cliff-green
  5. cliff-hang
  6. cliff-hanger
  7. cliff-hangers
  8. cliff-hanging
  9. cliff-hangs
  10. cliff-hung
  11. cliffage

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cliff-hanger (page history and authors); cliffhanger (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cliff-hanger.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cliff-hanger. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.