Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Consisting of eight syllables.
  • noun In prosody, a line consisting of eight syllables.

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

  • adjective Consisting of or containing eight syllables.

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

  • adjective Containing eight syllables

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

  • adjective having or characterized by or consisting of eight syllables

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

octo- +‎ syllabic

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Examples

  • The usual forms of the couplet used continuously are the 4-stress or short couplet ( "octosyllabic") and the

    The Principles of English Versification Paull Franklin Baum

  • My very dear Friend, -- I hear with wonder from Arabel of your repudiation of my word 'octosyllabic' for the two lines in your controversial poem.

    The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) 1907

  • My very dear Friend, ” I hear with wonder from Arabel of your repudiation of my word 'octosyllabic' for the two lines in your controversial poem.

    The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Kenyon, Frederic G 1898

  • It is Marvell, seventeenth-century master of the octosyllabic, whom this last line calls to mind [8]

    Susanna Blamire ( 1747-94) 2008

  • In the past Hollander has been explicit and defiant about this, as in his witty and accomplished imitation of Juvenal's third satire, where New York is substituted for Juvenal's Rome; or in the controlled octosyllabic garrulity of 'Upon Apthorp House' (from Movie-Going, 1962), where he thankfully greets the Hudson recovered after years in the New England wilderness:

    Gifts of the Gab Davie, Donald 1975

  • Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet, of the pleasures of suburban life viewed in moods respectively of light-hearted happiness and of reflection.

    A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher

  • Instead they exhibit the typical pseudo-classical traits of matter-of-factness and clearness; also, as Swift's personal notes, cleverness, directness, trenchant intellectual power, irony, and entire ease, to which latter the prevailing octosyllabic couplet meter contributes.

    A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher

  • The six-and-twenty octosyllabic lines thus magisterially denounced by our stern moralist in the middle of the nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them.

    Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 Various

  • 'Hudibras,' which appeared in three parts during a period of fifteen years, is written, like previous English satires, in rough-and-ready doggerel verse, in this case verse of octosyllabic couplets and in the form of a mock-epic.

    A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher

  • Cromwell, wrote much poetry of various sorts, some of it in the Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet.

    A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher

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