cliffhanger

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a narrative device in which a story or episode ends at a moment of acute tension or unresolved crisis, leaving characters — and by extension readers or viewers — suspended at the edge of disaster with no immediate resolution, compelling continued engagement with the next instalment; the term derives from the literal image of a character left hanging from a cliff at the end of a serialised story, a device common in Victorian serial fiction and early cinema that exploited the reader's or viewer's investment in a character's survival to ensure they would return for the next episode; in contemporary usage cliffhanger describes both this structural device in episodic storytelling and any real-world situation — a sports match at halftime, a political crisis at an uncertain moment — that creates the same quality of suspended tension and enforced waiting; the cliffhanger is fundamental to serial narrative because it converts the arbitrary pause imposed by publication or broadcast schedules into a dramatic event in its own right