Serials and the Cliffhanger

Nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines learned to sell stories in instalments. In the twentieth century, the movie serial grew up in cinemas, where you could see the next part every week. The word "cliffhanger" comes from there. Following the dictionaries, the earliest attestation is in the trade paper Variety in 1931, where it meant the movie serial itself. Only in the 1950s did it come to mean, as it does now, a situation whose outcome is withheld to the end. A heroine dangling from a cliff on a rope, a villain sawing at it with a knife that will not cut — the form was fixed enough that the word was born out of the form.