From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishcadenceca‧dence /ˈkeɪdəns/ noun [countable] 1 SPEAK A LANGUAGEthe way someone’s voice rises and falls, especially when reading out loud the cadence of my mother’s voice2 a regular repeated pattern of sounds or movements the Brazilian cadences of the music3 technicalAPM a set of chords
Examples from the Corpus
cadence• Above all, Plomer merely touches on the Elizabethan cadence and diction.• At first he did not recognize the tune, and then he caught its cadences.• Francie stopped playing in mid cadence.• The famous metallic voice with its slight Midlands cadences exercised its familiar thrill.• One imagines the cadences, the music and the language are unrivaled when spoken by the authors themselves.• We saturate babies in the cadences, sounds, rhythms, and purposes of spoken language.• The Marines, rifles on shoulders, marched in, matching the cadence of a distant pile driver.• She could imitate perfectly the cadence of my mother's voice.• the cadence and rhythm of poetryOrigin cadence (1300-1400) Old French Old Italian cadenza, from cadere “to fall”, from Latin; → CADAVER 