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Definition
something that prepares for or introduces what is to followor:
music #1: an introductory piece of music — such as might introduce an act of an opera
or:
music #2: a short independent piece of music — typically for piano
- The move is seen as a prelude to a declaration of war.
prelude = something that prepares for or introduces what is to follow
- a prelude to dictatorship
- the Prelude to Act 1 of La Traviata
- Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor
- My favorite song by Duke Ellington's is Prelude to a Kiss.
- The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking.George Orwell -- 1984
- Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.Ayn Rand -- The Fountainhead
- Vosch draws out the word, a prelude.Rick Yancey -- The Infinite Sea
- Years before, they often went there as prelude to a romantic night.Amy Tan -- The Bonesetter's Daughter
- And all of this was merely a prelude to the big street dance that would begin at midnight and end at one in the morning.Heather Brewer -- Tenth Grade Bleeds
- There were long lonely preludes to winter in the splendid pines, and a whistling of wind in the long grasses.Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
- This discovery was a prelude to a certain and horrible death.Jules Verne -- A Journey to the Center of the Earth
- The foregoing investigation into the nature of the idea of Texas is put down as a prelude to my journeying across Texas with Charley in Rocinante.John Steinbeck -- Travels with Charley
- The two ladies entered the drawing-room with that sort of official stiffness which preludes a formal communication.Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo
- O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come!Virgil -- The Aeneid
- And then the fact that he was actually saying something that sounded like it might be a prelude to asking me out"well, I nearly threw up.Meg Cabot -- The Princess Diaries
- Is this the prelude to some hackneyed saw?Sophocles -- Antigone
- Hippolyte said to me, without any prelude, that the general had promised the widow four hundred roubles.Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Idiot
- I had already been out many hours and felt the torment of a burning thirst, a prelude to my other sufferings.Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein
- Hepzibah involuntarily thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family, which were attributed to the legendary Alice.Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The House of the Seven Gables
prelude = something to prepare for what follows