Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in delay.
- noun A metrical foot in quantitative verse composed of a short syllable followed by a long one.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Same as
iambus .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun rare An iambus or iambic.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
metrical foot inverse consisting of anunstressed syllable followed by astressed syllable.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a metrical unit with unstressed-stressed syllables
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The "iamb" series makes visual reference to Josef Strau, an artist who uses lamps in his sculptures, and with whom Ms.
NYT > Home Page By MARTHA SCHWENDENER 2010
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And you can flip around an iamb so that the line begins with a little triplet, or an eighth note and a sixteenth note, which happens a lot—as in “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
THE ANTHOLOGIST Nicholson Baker 2009
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And you can flip around an iamb so that the line begins with a little triplet, or an eighth note and a sixteenth note, which happens a lot—as in “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
THE ANTHOLOGIST Nicholson Baker 2009
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You can change an initial trochee to an iamb by adding an “And” or an “O.”
THE ANTHOLOGIST Nicholson Baker 2009
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With a polished iamb, trochee, dactyl, amphibrach and anapest.
Archive 2009-06-01 Eric Dickens 2009
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You can change an initial trochee to an iamb by adding an “And” or an “O.”
THE ANTHOLOGIST Nicholson Baker 2009
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The widow and her children went home without so much as an iamb.
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In Shakespeare's day the groundlings were a lot more unruly, and you could say that that actress wasn't being sincere or true to her Shakespearean traditions, taking umbrage at a harmless bit of tom foolery that wouldn't have caused Richard Burbage to drop so much as a single iamb from To be, or not to be.
Lance Mannion: 2005
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In Shakespeare's day the groundlings were a lot more unruly, and you could say that that actress wasn't being sincere or true to her Shakespearean traditions, taking umbrage at a harmless bit of tom foolery that wouldn't have caused Richard Burbage to drop so much as a single iamb from To be, or not to be.
Miles of aisles 2005
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Which would make it a spondee and an iamb, I guess.
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