: ''For the base-8 numeral system, see
octal
The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the radix, base-8 number system, and uses the Numerical digit, digits 0 to 7. This is to say that 10octal represents eight and 100octal represents sixty-four. However, English, like most languages, ...
.''
An octonary is an eight-line section in a poem, song or psalm. The most notable example is found in
Psalm 119[Calvin ''Bible Commentaries: Psalms, Part IV'' p287 "Some call this the octonary psalm, because that, through every successive eight verses, the initial words of each line begin with the same letter in alphabetical order."]
In the French renaissance the
octonaire
The Octonaire is a genre of early French poem, then chanson, with the text divided into eight-verse sections, or octonaries, after the model of Psalm 118.
Three poets wrote Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde. The best known was Ant ...
became a form of moralizing
chanson.
It can also mean of 8th rank or order (primary, secondary, tertiary … octonary).
References
Poetic forms
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