Foot

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

John Constable (University of Cambridge)

The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Domains

Poetic/ rhetorical term

Dates

Places

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

The metrical unit of verse comprising a number of stressed and unstressed syllables. These are usually marked up with the sign ‘u’ over the unstressed syllable and a forward slash over the stressed syllable. Thus the kinds of feet appear as:

Anapest: u u / Dactyl: / u u Iamb: u / Trochee: / u Spondee: / / As an aid to memory, each Greek word actually has the stress pattern it names. Thus Spondee has two stresses, spond-dee.

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

73 words

Citation: Constable, John. "Foot". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=426, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Foot

Domains

Dates

Places

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback