Metrical foot
metrical unit in poetry
The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapaest. The foot might be compared to a bar, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in musical notation.
A metrical foot is, in classical poetry, a combination of two or more short or long syllables in a specific order; although this "does not provide an entirely reliable standard of measurement" in heavily accented Germanic languages such as English. In these languages it is defined as a combination of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables in a specific order.
In general, lines of verse can be classified according to the number of feet they contain, using the terms monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, and octameter, although seven or more feet in a line is uncommon. Pentameter is the most common in English verse. However, some lines of verse are not considered to be made up of feet, for example hendecasyllable lines.
In some kinds of metre, such as the Greek iambic trimeter, two feet are combined into a larger unit called a metron (pl.
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