Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A trisyllabic metrical foot having one accented or long syllable between two unaccented or short syllables, as in the word remember.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In prosody, a foot of three syllables, the middle one long, the first and last short: as, hăbērě, in Latin: the opposite of amphimacer.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Anc. Pros.) A foot of three syllables, the middle one long, the first and last short (˘ -- ˘); as, hăbērĕ. In modern prosody the accented syllable takes the place of the long and the unaccented of the short; as, pro-phet"ic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun prosody A metrical foot in ancient Greek or Latin consisting of two short syllables surrounding one long one (e.g. amāta).
  • noun prosody A metrical foot in modern prosody, consisting of three syllables, the middle one of which is stressed (e.g. Jamaica).

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a metrical unit with unstressed-stressed-unstressed syllables (e.g., `remember')

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin amphibrachys, from Greek amphibrakhus : amphi-, amphi- + brakhus, short; see mregh-u- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin amphibrachus, from Ancient Greek ἀμϕίβραχυς ("short at both ends"), from ἀμϕί + βραχύς ("short").

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