Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use prelude in a sentence

10 example sentences · noun, verb

Prelude means an introductory or preliminary performance or event. Example: “Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, called it a “very dangerous escalation and a prelude to potential conflict”.”

Examples of prelude by meaning

nounAn introductory or preliminary performance or event.

  • Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, called it a “very dangerous escalation and a prelude to potential conflict”.2025 December 11, Joseph Gedeon, quoting Adam Schiff, “US lawmakers condemn seizure of Venezuelan oil tanker: ‘Trump is sleepwalking us...

More sentences with prelude

  • Vorwaerts insisted that the BVG strike was but a prelude to a putsch.2014, Russel Lemmons, Goebbels And Der Angriff, page 104. From the entry Kozi
  • Meeting his doom so, the great hazarder fulfils a destiny for which his whole life was prelude.1913, W. Compton Leith, Sirenica, page 58. From the entry hazarder
  • To what monstrous inharmony of death was it the visible prelude?1909, Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh”, in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. I. From the entry inharmony
  • And I did not, as prelude to my death, say the cute things that are attributed to me.1982, Isaac Asimov, Alice Laurance, Speculations. From the entry meanling
  • It could be the prelude to an attack.1949, Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →OCLC, page 132. From the entry tap
  • In the middle distance a tall white skyscraper stood up, a prelude, or a foretouch to a great yellowish black cloud behind it.1916, Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday, page 57. From the entry foretouch
  • In the Marvelverse, mutants are potential victims of hate crimes and of state-sponsored pogroms, and of the sort of bureaucratic prying that is often a prelude to the latter.2008, Roz Kaveney, Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films, I. B. Tauris Co. Ltd, →ISBN, page 7. From the entry Marvelverse
  • At the end of the prelude of Caprice V, there is a chromatic ascending and descending scale of forty-eight notes to be played in one bow in legato.1979, Leslie Sheppard, Herbert R. Axelrod ·, Paganini, page 604. From the entry legato
  • In no wise is it possible for the State of Ekstasis to be attained by Mankind except as the prelude to Initiation in the Divine Mysteries.1918, Holden Edward Sampson, Theou Sophia. From the entry ekstasis

Meaning of prelude

  1. noun An introductory or preliminary performance or event.
  2. noun A short, free-form piece of music, originally one serving as an introduction to a longer and more complex piece; later, starting with the Romantic period, generally a stand-alone piece.
  3. noun A standard module or library of subroutines and functions to be imported, generally by default, into a program.

Full definition of prelude

Questions about prelude in a sentence

How do you use prelude in a sentence?
Prelude is used as a noun and verb. For example: “Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, called it a “very dangerous escalation and a prelude to potential conflict”.”
What is a short sentence with prelude?
“It could be the prelude to an attack.”
What does prelude mean?
Prelude means an introductory or preliminary performance or event.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prelude (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use prelude in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/prelude. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.