from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun Verse written in lines of five metrical feet.
noun A single line of such verse.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun In ancient prosody, a verse differing from the dactylic hexameter by suppression of the second half of the third and of the sixth foot; a dactylic dipenthemimeres or combination of two catalectic dactylic tripodies, thus:
noun The first half of the line ended almost without exception in a complete word and often with a pause in the sense. Spondees were excluded from the second half-line. The halves of the line often terminated in words of similar ending and emphasis, generally a noun and its attributive. This meter received its name from a false analysis of some ancient metricians, who explained it as consisting of two dactyls, a spondee, and two anapests.
Having five metrical feet: as, a pentameter verse.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun (Gr. & L.Pros.) A verse of five feet.
adjective Having five metrical feet.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun poetry A line in a poem having fivemetricalfeet.
noun poetryPoeticmetre in which each line has fivefeet.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun a verse line having five metrical feet
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Latin, from Greek pentametros : penta-, penta- + metron, measure; see meter.]
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Examples
Actually, the prevailing wisdom that iambic pentameter is somehow ideal for relating the rhythms of English speech seems deeply flawed to me.
When written in [[English]], both types are in iambic pentameter, that is each line is of five beats (iambs), with the stress on the second syllable in each two-syllable beat.
English, both types are in iambic pentameter, that is each line is of five beats (iambs), with the stress on the second syllable in each two-syllable beat.
When written in [[English]], both types are in iambic pentameter, that is each line is of five beats (iambs), with the stress on the second syllable in each two-syllable beat.
By "pentameter" is meant that the line has five feet or measures; by "iambic," that each foot contains two syllables, the first short or unaccented, the second long or accented.] which dominated the fashion of English poetry for the next century.
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