Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A line of verse consisting of five metrical feet.
- n. English verse composed in iambic pentameter.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In ancient prosody, a verse differing from the dactylic hexameter by suppression of the second half of the third and of the sixth foot; a dactylic dipenthemimeres or combination of two catalectic dactylic tripodies, thus:
- n. The first half of the line ended almost without exception in a complete word and often with a pause in the sense. Spondees were excluded from the second half-line. The halves of the line often terminated in words of similar ending and emphasis, generally a noun and its attributive. This meter received its name from a false analysis of some ancient metricians, who explained it as consisting of two dactyls, a spondee, and two anapests.
- Having five metrical feet: as, a pentameter verse.
Wiktionary
- n. poetry A line in a poem having five metrical feet.
- n. poetry Poetic metre in which each line has five feet.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Gr. & L.Pros.) A verse of five feet.
- adj. Having five metrical feet.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a verse line having five metrical feet
Etymologies
- Latin, from Greek pentametros : penta-, penta- + metron, measure; see meter1. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Actually, the prevailing wisdom that iambic pentameter is somehow ideal for relating the rhythms of English speech seems deeply flawed to me.”
Dipodic Verse : A.E. Stallings : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation
“The poem's iambic pentameter is frequently excellent: occasionally perfect regularity becomes a musical metaphor for stateliness, as in line 2.”
“Iambs can begin four-beat lines or so-called pentameter lines, which are really six-beat lines.”
“When written in [[English]], both types are in iambic pentameter, that is each line is of five beats (iambs), with the stress on the second syllable in each two-syllable beat.”
“English, both types are in iambic pentameter, that is each line is of five beats (iambs), with the stress on the second syllable in each two-syllable beat.”
“Shakespeare often wrote in iambic pentameter, meaning five iambic "feet" per line, each "foot" being a soft-hard syllable pair … da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM.”
“The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet".”
“By "pentameter" is meant that the line has five feet or measures; by "iambic," that each foot contains two syllables, the first short or unaccented, the second long or accented.] which dominated the fashion of English poetry for the next century.”
“If you want to send the most intellectual teachers, the ones who really like thinking about iambic pentameter and the quadratic formula, to the schools with the lowest performing students, then, please, give those teachers a lot of back-up on discipline.”
“May I suggest, that in honouring the promise you made your wife, the sonnet form you choose is the Italian Sonnet form, which is Petrarchan; so obviously will be in iambic pentameter, but the most comfortable and (in my opinion) elegant form: abbacddceffegg.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘pentameter’.
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Meters
knitmeter, butyrometer, cathetometer, handsometer, meter maid, spammeter, ceilometer, dilatometer, bdellometer, bolo-tie-meter, fathommeter, meet-and-greet-meter and 117 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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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6689 more...
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reginaterra's Words
purl, blow, squish, andean, generality, adaptation, lush, pack, filter, acquiesce, abstraction, sweet and 508 more...
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Pale Fire
Words gathered while reading Pale Fire.
larches, torquate, stillicide, vermiculate, preterist, theolatry, iridule, vulgarian, cloutish, lemniscate, torsion, trillium and 176 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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effleurer's Words
languor, nincompoop, masquerade, envelop, deceit, guttersnipe, undulating, ululation, ridiculous, insufferable, loverly, eternity and 89 more...
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dienekes's Words
chutzpah, lexicon, intrepid, pedagogical, schlemiel, schism, erudite, anathema, pugilist, jaunty, paradigm, automaton and 949 more...
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-meter, -metric, -metrical
measuring; having a particular measure
thermometer, hexameter, kilometer, barometer, centimeter, pentameter, pedometer, metronome, econometrics, metrics
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MsHalston's Words
theoretically, insufferable, apolitico, milquetoast, egregious, aplomb, elan, fraught, flummox, befrocked, moll, molten and 605 more...
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Poetry Terms
Words related to poems and poetry composition, analysis, and exploration.
sestina, iambic, pentameter, sonnet, limmerick, haiku, tanka, meter, foot, rhythm
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Bibliophilia
codex, matrix, patrix, caesura, incunabulum, syllabic, pictograph, scribe, vernacular, iambic, trochaic, pentameter and 36 more...
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Eilonwy's Theatre Words
tartuffified, mendacity, deus ex machina, soliloquy, dithyramb, iambic, pentameter, shakespearean, skene, fresnel, ellipsodial, tremors and 3 more...
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Construction
Words around the construction of words
morpheme, riming, phoneme, assonance, euphony, alliteration, rhyme, logos, etymology, similitude, language, syntactic and 87 more...
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the library
vellum, watermark, dustjacket, chapbook, bookplate, edition, inscribed, signed, haiku, ode, limerick, sonnet and 70 more...
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Poetry Rhythms
trochaic, iambic, anapestic, dactylic, monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, octameter
Tweets
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