Word.ws English Dictionary

cliffhanger

UK/ˌklɪfˈhæŋ.ə(ɹ)/

cliffhanger noun: an ending or stopping point calculated to leave a story unresolved, in order to create suspense.

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

cliffhanger meaning in Tagalog, Arabic, Malay and Persian

cliffhanger in Tagalog

(narratology) an ending or stopping point
pabitin

cliffhanger in Arabic

(narratology) an ending or stopping point
نِهَايَة مُشَوِّقَة, تَشْوِيق tašwīq

cliffhanger in Malay

(narratology) an ending or stopping point
babak tergantung

cliffhanger in Persian

(narratology) an ending or stopping point
پایان نفسگیر pâyân-e nafas-gir

Antonyms of cliffhanger

Forms of cliffhanger

pluralcliffhangers
alternative formcliff hanger
alternative formcliff-hanger

Origin of cliffhanger

From cliff + hanger, evoking the image of someone left hanging from a cliff, thereby having an uncertain fate. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with the serialized version of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes, published in Tinsley's Magazine in the 1870s, in which the character Henry Knight is left hanging off of a cliff. It was inspired by a real life story from his wife Emma's childhood, when she had to rescue one of her school friends from a similar position.

Words formed from cliffhanger

Questions about cliffhanger

What does cliffhanger mean?
Cliffhanger means an ending or stopping point calculated to leave a story unresolved, in order to create suspense.
What is cliffhanger in Tagalog?
Cliffhanger in Tagalog is pabitin. See Cliffhanger meaning in Tagalog.
What part of speech is cliffhanger?
Cliffhanger is a noun.
How do you pronounce cliffhanger?
Cliffhanger is pronounced /ˌklɪfˈhæŋ.ə(ɹ)/ (UK).
What is the plural of cliffhanger?
The plural of cliffhanger is cliffhangers.

Words near cliffhanger in the dictionary

  1. cliffed
  2. Cliffes
  3. cliffgreen
  4. cliffgreens
  5. cliffhang
  6. cliffhanger
  7. cliffhangers
  8. cliffhanging
  9. cliffhangs
  10. cliffhung
  11. Cliffie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-cliffhanger.ogg.

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