We study the termination properties of well-moded programs, and we show that, under suitable conditions, for these programs there exists an algebraic characterization-in the style of Apt and Pedreschi, Studies in pure prolog: termination, in: J.W. Lloyd (Ed.), Proceedings of the Simposium in Computational Logic, Springer, Berlin, 1990, pp. 150–176-of the property of being terminating. This characterization enjoys the properties of being compositional and, to some extent, of being easy to check.
