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  1. iamb love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable or a short syllable followed by a long syllable, as in delay.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. Same as iambus.

Wiktionary

  1. n. A metrical foot in verse consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. rare An iambus or iambic.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a metrical unit with unstressed-stressed syllables

Etymologies

  1. From French iambe, from Latin iambus. (Wiktionary)
  2. French iambe, from Latin iambus, from Greek iambos. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “The "iamb" series makes visual reference to Josef Strau, an artist who uses lamps in his sculptures, and with whom Ms.”

    NYT > Home Page

  • “And you can flip around an iamb so that the line begins with a little triplet, or an eighth note and a sixteenth note, which happens a lot—as in “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.””

    Simon & Schuster: THE ANTHOLOGIST

  • “You can change an initial trochee to an iamb by adding an “And” or an “O.””

    Simon & Schuster: THE ANTHOLOGIST

  • “With a polished iamb, trochee, dactyl, amphibrach and anapest.”

    Archive 2009-06-01

  • “The widow and her children went home without so much as an iamb.”

    The Friday Fillip — Slaw

  • “In Shakespeare's day the groundlings were a lot more unruly, and you could say that that actress wasn't being sincere or true to her Shakespearean traditions, taking umbrage at a harmless bit of tom foolery that wouldn't have caused Richard Burbage to drop so much as a single iamb from To be, or not to be.”

    Lance Mannion:

  • “Which would make it a spondee and an iamb, I guess.”

    languagehat.com: CHOIRS/QUIRES.

  • “For the next seven years, despite repeated strokes, my grandfather worked at a small desk, piecing together the legendary fragments into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda there, soldering an anapest or an iamb.”

    Middlesex

  • “In our understanding, the sonnet seems to be the very shape of thought: in its dense, patterned form it exteriorizes thought; and "I think" or "I thought" is the perfect iamb.”

    Thinking about the Other in Romantic Love

  • “The English-speaking foreigner is at first surprised, if he takes to scanning Pushkin's blank verse, to find that there are few substitutions of feet — hardly even a trochee for an iamb.”

    The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov

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hypernyms (3)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. metrical unit
  1. foot
  1. metrical foot

same context (9)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. iambus
  1. hemistich
  1. spondee
  1. freeness
  1. dactyl
  1. disyllabic
  1. dolour
  1. trochee
  1. speech

reverse dictionary (4)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. iambus
  1. iambic
  1. choriamb
  1. kin

tags (1)

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  1. linguistics

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‘iamb’ has been looked up 3500 times, added to 24 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 8.