If you live in Italy, you've almost certainly been in one of these today. The question is: what do you call it?
Both fila and coda mean "queue" or "line" in English, and while Italians use them pretty much interchangeably, there are some minor differences worth knowing about.
Fila (pronounced FEE-lah) comes from filo (thread) – the idea of people lined up like beads on a string. You might also connect it with the English verb 'file', when used to talk about lining up in an orderly fashion.
Meanwhile coda (pronounced KOH-dah) literally means "tail" – the same word you'd use for an animal's tail or a ponytail (una coda di cavallo). I imagine this one as more of a snaking queue.
Both work fine for describing a queue of people:
C'è una fila/coda lunghissima alla posta
There's a huge queue at the post office
But when talking about traffic, coda is the word you'll hear:
C'è coda in autostrada
There's traffic/a tailback on the motorway
Siamo bloccati in coda
We're stuck in traffic
Using fila for vehicle queues sounds distinctly odd to Italian ears. It's coda for cars, always.
For organised lines of people, especially when they're arranged in rows, fila tends to feel more natural:
I bambini camminano in fila per due
The children walk in pairs/two by two
Mettersi in fila
To get in line/form a queue
Though mettersi in coda works just as well.
The most common phrases use both interchangeably. Fare la fila or fare la coda both mean to queue up or stand in line:
Saltare la fila or saltare la coda
To jump the queue:
The key thing to remember: traffic is coda, not fila. For people queuing, either works, though you might find that fila edges ahead for particularly neat and organised rows - not that I notice too many of those in Italy.
And in the event that there's just a chaotic crowd milling about outside, say, the Questura, the word you'd use for that instead is una folla.
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