The foot is the basic metrical unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few variations, by the sound pattern the foot represents. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. Contrasting with stress-timed languages such as English, in syllable-timed languages such as French, a foot is a single syllable.
The lines of verse are classified according to the number of feet they contain, eg pentameter. However some lines of verse are not considered to be made up of feet, eg hendecasyllable.
The English word "foot" is a translation of the Latin term pes, plural pedes; the equivalent term in Greek, sometimes used in English as well, is metron, plural metra, which means "measure". The foot might be compared to a measure in musical notation.
The foot is a purely metrical unit; there is no inherent relation to a word or phrase as a unit of meaning or syntax, though the interplay between these is an aspect of the poet's skill and artistry.
Classical meter
Below are listed 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 "betray".
Disyllables
Macron and breve notation: ¯ = stressed/long syllable, ˘ = unstressed/short syllable
Trisyllables
Tetrasyllables
See also
- Accent (poetry)
- Syllable weight
References
External links
- Comprehensive list of feet and colas up to 12 syllables long
- Prosody Tutorial by H.T. Kirby-Smith