The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English

accentual-syllabic verse Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line (poetry), line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one ...

and the

quantitative meter In poetry, metre ( Commonwealth spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set o ...

of classical

ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...

and

Latin poetry The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205-184 BC. History Scholars conve ...

. The unit is composed of

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...

s, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb,

trochee In English poetic metre and modern linguistics, a trochee () is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. But in Latin and Ancient Greek poetic metre, a trochee is a heavy syllable followed by a light one ( ...

dactyl Dactyl may refer to: * Dactyl (mythology), a legendary being * Dactyl (poetry), a metrical unit of verse * Dactyl Foundation, an arts organization * Finger, a part of the hand * Dactylus, part of a decapod crustacean * "-dactyl", a suffix u ...

, and anapest. The foot might be compared to a

bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar * Chocolate bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud * Bar ( ...

, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation f ...

. The English word "foot" is a translation of the Latin term ''pes'', plural ''pedes'', which in turn is a translation of the Ancient Greek ποῦς, pl. πόδες. The Ancient Greek prosodists, who invented this terminology, specified that a foot must have both an

arsis Arsis is an American heavy metal band from Virginia Beach, Virginia, formed in 2000. The band is currently signed to Nuclear Blast. History Demos and Willowtip era (2000–2006) Arsis was started by James Malone and Michael "Mike" Van ...

and a thesis, that is, a place where the foot was raised ("arsis") and where it was put down ("thesis") in beating time or in marching or dancing. The Greeks recognised three basic types of feet, the iambic (where the ratio of arsis to thesis was 1:2), the dactylic (where it was 2:2) and the paeonic (where it was 3:2). Lines of verse are classified according to the number of feet they contain, e.g. pentameter. However some lines of verse are not considered to be made up of feet, e.g.

hendecasyllable In poetry, a hendecasyllable (sometimes hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and ...

. In some kinds of metre, such as the Greek iambic trimeter, two feet are combined into a larger unit called a metron (pl. metra) or dipody. The foot is a purely metrical unit; there is no inherent relation to a word or phrase as a unit of meaning or

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...

, though the interplay between these is an aspect of the poet's skill and artistry.

Classical meter

Below listed are 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 A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

"), and "short" becomes "unstressed" ("unaccented"). For example, an iamb, which is short-long in classical meter, becomes unstressed-stressed, as in the English word "alone".

Disyllables

'' Macron and breve notation: '' Long-foot-meter

= stressed/long syllable, Short-foot-meter

= unstressed/short syllable

Trisyllables

Tetrasyllables

References

External links

Comprehensive list of feet and colas up to 12 syllables long

by

H.T. Kirby-Smith H.T. or Tom Kirby-Smith (born 1938) is an American author and poet. Life H.T. Kirby-Smith grew up on the Cumberland Plateau, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He received his B.A. from Sewanee an M.A. from Harvard and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship ...