Foot (prosody)

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In verse, many meters use a foot as the basic unit in their description of the underlying rhythm of a poem. Both the quantitative meter of Classical poetry and the Accentual-Syllabic meter of most poetry in English use the foot as the fundamental building block. A foot consists of a certain number of syllables forming part of a line of verse. A foot is described by the character and number of syllables it contains: in English, feet are named for the combination of accented and unaccented syllables; in other languages such as Latin and Greek, the duration of the syllable (long or short) is measured.

When scanning a line of verse, a poet looks at feet as the basic rhythmic unit rather than words. A foot can consist of multiple words and a single word can contain many feet; furthermore, a foot can and often does bridge multiple words, containing, for example, the last two syllables of one word and the first of the next. To scan for feet, one should focus on the stream of sound alone and forget that words exist at all.

Contents

1 The poetic feet in classical meter

1.1 Disyllables
1.2 Trisyllables
1.3 Tetrasyllables

The poetic feet in classical meter

Below are listed the names given to the poetic feet by classical metrics. The feet are classified first by the number of syllables in the foot (disyllables have two, trisyllables three, and tetrasyllables four) and secondarily by the pattern of vowel lengths (in classical languages) or syllable stresses (in English poetry) which they comprise.

The following lists describe the feet in terms of vowel length (as in classical languages). Translated into syllable stresses (as in English poetry), 'long' becomes 'stressed' ('accented'), and 'short' becomes 'unstressed' ('unaccented'). For example, an iamb, which is short-long in classical meter, becomes unstressed-stressed, as in the English word "betray."

The most common in English verse are the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl, and the anapest.

Disyllables

pyrrhus or dibrach: short-short
iamb: short-long
trochee or choree: long-short
spondee: long-long

Trisyllables

tribrach: short-short-short
anapest or antidactylus: short-short-long
amphibrach: short-long-short
bacchius: short-long-long
dactyl: long-short-short
amphimacer or cretic: long-short-long
antibacchius: long-long-short
molossus: long-long-long

Tetrasyllables

tetrabrach or proceleusmatic: short-short-short-short
quartus paeon: short-short-short-long
tertius paeon: short-short-long-short
minor ionic, or double iamb: short-short-long-long
secundus paeon: short-long-short-short
diamb: short-long-short-long
antispast: short-long-long-short
first epitrite: short-long-long-long
primus paeon: long-short-short-short
choriamb: long-short-short-long
ditrochee: long-short-long-short
second epitrite: long-short-long-long
major ionic: long-long-short-short
third epitrite: long-long-short-long
fourth epitrite: long-long-long-short
dispondee: long-long-long-long

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