cadence
cadence
Latin
“Surprisingly, cadence began with falling, not flow.”
Cadence comes from Latin cadentia, "a falling," from cadere, "to fall." Roman Latin used the verb widely for physical descent, collapse, and decline. Late Latin then formed nouns for the act or pattern of falling. The root image was downward motion, plain and bodily.
That image entered music and speech because sound also falls. Medieval and Renaissance usage in Latin and French applied cadence to a falling close in melody or voice. By the 14th and 15th centuries, French cadence could mean rhythmic flow and especially the way a phrase comes to rest. The end of a line sounded like a controlled descent.
English took cadence from French in the later Middle Ages. It first appeared in musical and rhetorical settings, naming measured flow and the close of a phrase. Poets, preachers, and composers all used it. The word was useful because it joined motion, rhythm, and ending in one form.
Modern English kept that breadth. Cadence can be the beat of marching feet, the rise and fall of speech, or the harmonic resolution at the end of a musical phrase. The notion of falling never disappeared; it became graceful. Cadence is what a movement sounds like when it comes down into shape.
Related Words
Today
Cadence now means the measured rhythm or flow of sound and movement. It is common in music for a closing progression, in speech for rise and fall, and in bodily motion for repeated patterned timing.
The word still carries the old sense of descent, but in refined form: a phrase falls into completion. That is why cadence often implies finish as much as rhythm. "A falling into form."
Explore more words