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
Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...
and
Latin poetry. The unit is composed of
syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
s, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the
iamb,
trochee
In poetic metre, a trochee ( ) is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, unstressed one, in qualitative meter, as found in English, and in modern linguistics; or in quantitative meter, as found in ...
,
dactyl, and
anapaest. The foot might be compared to a
bar, or a
beat divided into
pulse groups, in
musical notation
Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The proce ...
.
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
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoke ...
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
Pentameter (, 'measuring five ( feet)') is a term describing the meter of a poem. A poem is said to be written in a particular pentameter when the lines of the poem have the length of five metrical feet. A metrical foot is, in classical poetry, ...
,
hexameter
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek as well as in Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of s ...
,
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. metra) or dipody.
Etymology
The English word "foot" is a translation of the Latin term ''pes'', plural ''pedes'', which in turn is a translation of the Ancient Greek πούς, pl. πόδες. The Ancient Greek prosodists, who invented this terminology, specified that a foot must have both an
arsis and a thesis, that is, a place where the foot was raised ("arsis") and where it was put down ("thesis") in beating time or in marching or dancing. The Greeks recognised three basic types of feet, the iambic (where the ratio of arsis to thesis was 1:2), the dactylic (where it was 2:2) and the paeonic (where it was 3:2).
Classical meter
Below listed are 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 "alone".
A short syllable in this context is known as an arsis, while a long one is known as a thesis.
See also
*
Accent (poetry)
*
Syllable weight
References
External links
Comprehensive list of feet and colas up to 12 syllables longby
H.T. Kirby-Smith
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