Cour, split-cour, OVA, “Final Season”: the release-calendar glossary

By Taha Bilal Özbey · Published August 6, 2026

Release schedules come with their own vocabulary, and half of the confusion about “when does it come back?” is really vocabulary confusion. This glossary explains the terms you will keep meeting on any release calendar — ours included — from the point of view that matters here: what each term means for when you actually get episodes.

Cour — the unit anime seasons are made of

A cour is one quarter of the TV year: roughly 11–13 weekly episodes airing inside one of the four seasonal blocks. Winter runs January–March, Spring April–June, Summer July–September, and Fall October–December. When fans say “a two-cour show”, they mean about 24–26 episodes airing across two consecutive quarters without a long break.

Split-cour — the planned mid-story break

A split-cour show airs one cour, deliberately rests for a season or two, then airs the next cour — same production, planned gap. On a calendar this looks alarming (episodes suddenly stop) but it is not a cancellation: the continuation usually already has an announced window. This is why a title can vanish from the weekly grid for months and return without ever being “renewed”.

“Season 2” vs “Part 2” vs “Final Season”

Season 2 usually means a genuinely new production green-lit after the first — often with a gap of a year or more.
Part 2 (or Cour 2) usually means the second half of an already-planned run — the split-cour case above, with a much shorter gap.
“Final Season” is marketing language, not a promise of length: several famous “final” seasons have spanned multiple parts and years. Treat it as a label for the last story arc, not a countdown.

OVA, ONA, special, recap — the side formats

OVA (Original Video Animation): an episode or short series released for home video/streaming rather than TV broadcast — often a bonus story. Release dates are irregular by nature.
ONA (Original Net Animation): made for the internet first; increasingly just means “streaming-original”. Full seasons can drop at once instead of weekly.
Special: a catch-all for one-off extras — holiday episodes, epilogues, crossovers. On our calendar they appear as separate entries of the parent title.
Recap / clip show: a summary episode stitched from existing footage, usually placed mid-season or between seasons. Worth knowing so a “new episode” on the schedule does not oversell itself.

Simulcast, simuldub, delay

Simulcast: the subtitled stream that goes live at (or right after) the original broadcast moment — one global instant, read differently by every time zone.
Simuldub: a dubbed version produced on a rolling basis, typically trailing the simulcast by weeks.
Delay / preair: individual episodes sometimes slip (production issues, events pre-empting a slot) or occasionally air early at festivals. Calendars update; this is normal, not a pattern.

How these look on this site

Every entry on the weekly grid is a concrete release: an episode with its number, or a movie premiere, at a specific time in your time zone. Seasonal blocks map to our season archive pages, so “what aired in Summer 2026?” is a page, not a memory exercise. And when a source gives us only a date without a reliable hour, the entry says “time TBA” rather than guessing.

Terms drift: fandom usage of cour/season/part is looser than production reality, and studios name things for marketing. When in doubt, a title's detail page shows what is concretely scheduled — which is the part that matters for your watchlist.

How this guide was made: it was drafted with AI assistance from MovieSchedule's own schedule data (AniList, TVmaze and TMDB), then reviewed and published by Taha Bilal Özbey. Spotted an error? Let us know via the contact page.