Word of the Day:

March 24, 2026

cadence

noun KAY-dunss

What it Means

Cadence is used to refer to various rhythmic or repeated motions, activities, or patterns of sound, or to the way a person's voice changes by gently rising and falling while they are speaking.

// Ivy relaxed at the beach, listening to the cadence of the surf.

// He speaks with a soft Southern cadence.

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Cadence in Context

“Urged by a fast-talking auctioneer and his familiar cadence, paddles shot up as bids climbed into the four- and five-figure range.” — Lily Moayeri, Rolling Stone, 29 Jan. 2026

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Did You Know?

A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken, cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as birdsong) to be sure. Cadence comes from Middle English borrowed from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means “rhythm in verse.” (You may also recognize a cadence cousin, sweet cadenza, as a word that is familiar in the opera universe.) And from there our cadence traces just a little further backward to the Latin verb cadere “to sound rhythmically, to fall.” Praise the rising and the falling of the lilting in our language, whether singing songs or rhyming or opining on it all.

Word Family Quiz

Fill in the blanks to create an adjective derived from Latin cadere (“to fall”) that describes a plant that has leaves that fall off every year: d _ _ i _ u _ u _.

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