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episode

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɛp.ɪ.səʊd//
  • United States//ˈɛp.ə.soʊd//
  • Australia//ˈep.ɪ.səʉd//

A discrete but connected event, situation, or period within a broader sequence, narrative, or life course.

noun

  1. 1

    A discrete but connected event, situation, or period within a broader sequence, narrative, or life course.

    It was a most embarrassing episode in my life.

    The Attorney-General, however, had used this episode, which Martin in retrospect had felt to be a blot on the scutcheon, merely to emphasise the intelligence and resource of the prisoner.

    Three of the great extinctions appear to have occurred during cold episodes and two during hot episodes.

  2. 2

    A bounded narrative unit within a television series, constituting a single installment that is structurally discrete yet interrelated with the series as a whole.

    I can't wait till next week’s episode.

    We all know how genius “Kamp Krusty,” “A Streetcar Named Marge,” “Homer The Heretic,” “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie” and “Mr. Plow” are, but even the relatively unheralded episodes offer wall-to-wall laughs and some of the smartest, darkest, and weirdest gags ever Trojan-horsed into a network cartoon with a massive family audience.

Etymology

From French épisode, from New Latin *epīsodium, from Ancient Greek ἐπεισόδιον (epeisódion, “a parenthetic addition, episode”), neuter of ἐπεισόδιος (epeisódios, “following upon the entrance, coming in besides, adventitious”), from ἐπί (epí, “on”) + εἰς (eis, “into”) + ὁδός (hodós, “way”).

Forms

plural
episodes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).