Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- 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
- n. Same as iambus.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. rare An iambus or iambic.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a metrical unit with unstressed-stressed syllables
Etymologies
- From French iambe, from Latin iambus. (Wiktionary)
- 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.”
“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.””
“You can change an initial trochee to an iamb by adding an “And” or an “O.””
“With a polished iamb, trochee, dactyl, amphibrach and anapest.”
“The widow and her children went home without so much as an iamb.”
“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.”
“Which would make it a spondee and an iamb, I guess.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘iamb’.
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LIT - Ulysses - key words and phrases
vanish, number one, archangel, commodious, dominie, rubble, glisten, morose, spindle, ventilation, Blessed, christian and 503 more...
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Prosody
Your terms and additions are welcome.
headless iamb, tailless trochee, dibrach, disyllable, trisyllable, tetrasyllable, pyrrhus, iamb, trochee, choree, choreus, tribrach and 203 more...
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phrontistery - i
from phrontistery.info
izzat, izzard, ixiodic, izard, ivresse, ixora, ivorist, ivoride, ivorine, iulus, iulan, ithomiid and 510 more...
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Poetry Terms
April is National Poetry Month. Add your favorite poetry terms to this new list!
alliteration, anapest, alexandrine, caesura, assonance, ballad, blank verse, iamb, conceit, couplet, consonance, dactyl and 30 more...
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Surprising four-letter words
I imagine most of these will be Anglo-Saxon, not likely to crop up in the average day's conversation, and thus excellent for Scrabble. ("most" is too common, likewise "will" and even "crop", in an...
blet, quim, clit, buff, sire, wiki, blog, loam, waft, heft, mare, lilt and 68 more...
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Really Cool Four-Letter Words
I marvel at the amazing variety of four-letter words in the English language. And that's not even counting really common (to me) words like fuck.
ibis, pelf, sofa, iota, oboe, lava, icon, sped, puha, pulp, puma, kyat and 150 more...
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words found to be generally pleasing
alabaster, mahogany, camphor, coalesce, spire, portmanteau, gadabout, palaver, dolor, dour, dun, luminesce and 610 more...
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Professional Scrabble Lexicon (TWL)
A myriad of game-changing words every Scrabble addict must have in his arsenal.
Keep in mind that these are all tried-and-true feasibly playable words selected for their handiness, i.e...paragon, pignora, ganef, suttee, origan, ohia, aioli, abasement, lehr, mho, tallow, harelike and 843 more...
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vorpal's Words
parabiosis, penumbra, defenestrate, portmanteau, sturm und drang, perspicacious, quixotic, copacetic, obfuscate, inveigle, shadenfreude, cloister and 349 more...
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xstala's Words
oneiric, inchoate, clandestine, tangerine, brusque, clout, benedictine, argonaut, juniper, tulle, zealot, vesper and 175 more...
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ifjuly's list
favorite words. some are made up injokes between me and my husband or family.
skein, zaftig, july, bed, orifice, aesthete, ink, parce-que, desormais, cake, pusillanimous, pulse and 531 more...
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merfee's Words
supple, dichotomy, relish, rhapsody, pneumonoultramicr..., embrace, ishmael, ebullient, recalcitrant, elegy, char, lugubrious and 522 more...
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nfrank's Words
antediluvian, equivocate, inchoate, denouement, effulgent, edify, endemic, palimpsest, apropos, circumnavigate, circumlocution, cognoscente and 484 more...
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Ulysses
This is a list of the more difficult English words found in James Joyce's Ulysses. It will continually be updated as I read along. The list is in reverse chronological order, meaning that the last ...
equine, untonsured, corpuscle, prelate, parapet, dactyl, jejune, lancet, jalap, barbican, valise, dewsilky and 377 more...
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hip
words that are in vogue in my current lexical output.
i say these words a lot.
or i think about these words a lot.voguish, concordant, amble, moth, rollie, patois, viable, melancholy, dram, verdant, ruse, beautiful and 51 more...
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applebone's Words
effervescent, tripartite, aplomb, rarefied, aerie, sifted, dorsiflexion, whelk, ilk, anathema, philology, uvula and 21 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for iamb.

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