Log in or Sign up
  1. alexandrine love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A line of English verse composed in iambic hexameter, usually with a caesura after the third foot.
  2. n. A line of French verse consisting of 12 syllables with a caesura usually falling after the sixth syllable.
  3. adj. Characterized by or composed in either of these meters.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Same as Alexandrian, 1.
  2. n. In prosody, an iambic hexapody, or series of six iambic feet. French Alexandrines are written in couplets, alternately acatalectic with masculine rimes and hypercatalectic with feminine rimes. French tragedies are generally composed in Alexandrines. The cesura occurs at the end of the third foot. The second line of the following extract is an example:

Wiktionary

  1. n. A line of poetic meter having twelve syllables, usually divided into two or three equal parts.
  2. n. An Alexandrine parrot or parakeet.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Belonging to Alexandria; Alexandrian.
  2. n. A kind of verse consisting in English of twelve syllables.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. (prosody) a line of verse that has six iambic feet

Etymologies

  1. French alexandrin, from Old French, from Alexandre, title of a romance about Alexander the Great that was written in this meter. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “The 6-stress line is called the alexandrine (probably from the name of an Old French poem in this metre).”

    The Principles of English Versification

  • “a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the form of which this romance gave its name -- "alexandrine" verse), the work of Lambert le Tort and”

    A History of French Literature Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II.

  • “William Carlos Williams' poem is structured into three verses, but it is basically three alexandrine 12-syllable lines, which makes it an extremely easy form to follow.”

    This Is Just To Say

  • “The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer.”

    Les Miserables

  • “Hear, hear; that's the first thing about poetry I remember learning--the alexandrine verse--its soft and hard accents--"aloft, I laughed.”

    Surviving Yet Another Day

  • “Too many marching alexandrine feet for me, pieds, like the pied in the Pied Piper or the Piedmont, but not impediment, though I once saw a man wearing a pedometer the Lone Ranger had sent him.”

    Poetic Justice

  • “One day I learned in school about an alexandrine--and even today I still remember that an alexandrine was a type of poem some oldtimer wrote honoring Alexander the Great--and how an alexandrine fit a certain pattern based on syllabic time counted by iambs and I'll be damned if I learned where the caesuras go.”

    Poetic Justice

  • “But Jonathan's a smart cookie and up on his old-time as well as modern poetry; I saw him discussing the alexandrine in one of his posts.”

    Surviving Yet Another Day

  • “Yet there will be found some instances where I have completely failed in this attempt, and one, which I here request the reader to consider as an erratum, where there is left, most inadvertently, an alexandrine in the middle of a stanza.”

    The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • “It would not have surprised me to learn that I must subtract at least half a dozen syllables from that portentous phrase to reduce it to alexandrine dimensions.”

    The Guermantes Way

Show 10 more examples...

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

synonyms (1)

Words with the same meaning

  1. Alexandrian

hypernyms (2)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. line of poetry
  1. line of verse

same context (23)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. 11-syllable
  2. blank
  3. octosyllabic
  4. Saturnian
  1. kilo-
  2. french
  3. richly-embroidered
  4. duad
  1. alliterative
  2. trochaic
  3. reddish-purple
  4. ci-devant
  1. intermetallic
  2. wide-set
  3. quaternary
  4. septet
  1. bran-new
  2. accentual
  3. quatrain
  4. closed-casket
  1. Æ
  2. inartificial
  3. n'est-ce

reverse dictionary (6)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. non-domicile
  1. Alexandrian
  1. heroic verse
  1. Spenserian stanza
  1. confession
  1. snake-rat

Wordmap

(beta)

Word visualization

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘alexandrine’.

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • hernesheir (n): a line of six iambic feet that is often used to conclude a work written in heroic couplets.

    "Then, at the last and only couplet fraught | With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, | A needless Alexandrine ends the song, | That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." --Alexander Pope

    (n): a line of twelve syllables that is the dominant form of French verse. Jan 17, 2009

Tweets

Looking for tweets for alexandrine.

‘alexandrine’ has been looked up 1407 times, loved by 3 people, added to 14 lists, commented on 1 time, and has a Scrabble score of 19.