Word.ws English Dictionary

pre-Code

pre-Code adjective: prior to the introduction of the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines for the US film industry widely applied between 1934 and 1968.

Adjective

pre-Code (not comparable)

  1. Prior to the introduction of the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines for the US film industry widely applied between 1934 and 1968.
    • The Sign of the Cross, in certain senses the ultimate pre-Code movie, can still have a queasying ^([sic]) effect on viewers with its arena brutality, and its effect on 1933 audiences was that much stronger2005, Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall

Noun

pre-Code (plural pre-Codes)

  1. A pre-Code movie, especially one that was subsequently banned under the Hays Code.
    • The most brutal pre-Codes take the viewer to Hell, and only sometimes back, just as the noir films did after the war a one-way ticket to oblivion, destruction, and death.2013 June 27, Andre Spicer, Helen Hanson, A Companion to Film Noir, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN
    • The good news is that most of the pre-Codes mentioned in these pages are either available on video or can be seen on television.2014 July 15, Mick LaSalle, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, Macmillan, →ISBN

Forms of pre-Code

Adjective
alternative formprecode
Noun
pluralpre-Codes

Origin of pre-Code

From pre- + code.

Questions about pre-Code

What does pre-Code mean?
Pre-Code means prior to the introduction of the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines for the US film industry widely applied between 1934 and 1968.
What part of speech is pre-Code?
Pre-Code can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near pre-Code in the dictionary

  1. pre-charging
  2. pre-chorus
  3. pre-choruses
  4. pre-Christian
  5. pre-Christians
  6. pre-Code
  7. pre-Codes
  8. pre-colonial
  9. pre-Columbian
  10. pre-combat
  11. pre-combustion

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pre-Code (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: “pre-Code.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pre-code. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.