(click/touch triangles for details)
Definition
music: a composition played in a leisurely or slow tempo- "Adagio for Strings," he said.Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones
- This is the adagio, the first movement.James Patterson -- Kiss the Girls
- In reaction he put his arms about her but she relaxed wearily backward; he held her like that for a moment as in the end of an adagio, her eyes closed, her hair falling straight back like that of a girl drowned.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night
- By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary
- Finally the room was left—after these last twenty minutes of delirious activity—in what might be termed provisional silence, amid the depths of which I could hear only the soft heartsick adagio scratching on the phonograph, and the woman's broken sobs on the bed above me.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- He just started Duffy doing a dance along the edge, a kind of delicate, feather-toed, bemused, slow-motion adagio accompanied by arms pinwheeling around a face which was like a surprised custard pie with a hole scooped in the middle of the meringue, and the hole was Duffy's mouth, but no sound came out of it.Robert Penn Warren -- All the King's Men
- The lovely adagio from the Fourth Symphony floated down, merging like the serene, steadfast throb of a human pulse with my exalted mood.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice