Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A metrical foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In ancient prosody, a foot consisting of two long times or syllables, one of which constitutes the thesis and the other the arsis: it is accordingly tetrasemic and isorrhythmic. The spondee is principally used as a substitute for a dactyl or an anapest. In the former case it is a dactylic spondee ( for ), in the latter an anapestic spondee ( for ). An irrational spondee represents a trisemic foot, trochee, or iambus ( for , or for ). It is found in the even places of trochaic lines and in the odd places of iambic lines, also in logaœdic verses, especially as representing the initial trochee (“basis”). A foot consisting of two spondees is called a dispondee.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Pros.) A poetic foot of two long syllables, as in the Latin word
lēgēs .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
word ormetrical foot of twosyllables , either bothlong or bothstressed .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a metrical unit with stressed-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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It's in a beat called iambic trimeter: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM, which keeps it light-hearted, but generally when Kunitz uses the word "God" he does so in what's called a spondee, with two strong syllables in succession.
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Most years from 1300 to 1999 started with more of a spondee.
On tens, teens, or whatever DC 2009
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Horace's Epicuri de grege, but let none add to it the sad spondee which ends the hemistich, "is more unsettling, since it mainly seems devoted to playing, through negation and elaborate periphrasis, with the possibility of referring to its subject as" an
Economies of Excess in Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, and Baudelaire 2007
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But after the volta, the same word has changed its intensity entirely, the spondee conveying an unstoppable force that floods over the expected unstressed syllable in irresistible exhortation.
Archive 2008-10-01 Lemon Hound 2008
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Iambs, spondee, trochee were liberally abused in rhythms broken and confused;
You Eat Bovine Ivan Donn Carswell 2008
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The first two quatrains have a somber tone, a heaviness emphasized by the repeating phrase “if we must die,” with its sonorous spondee.
Annie Finch reads Claude McKay Lemon Hound 2008
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Iambs, spondee, trochee were liberally abused in rhythms broken and confused;
Archive 2008-04-01 Ivan Donn Carswell 2008
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But after the volta, the same word has changed its intensity entirely, the spondee conveying an unstoppable force that floods over the expected unstressed syllable in irresistible exhortation.
Annie Finch reads Claude McKay Lemon Hound 2008
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The first two quatrains have a somber tone, a heaviness emphasized by the repeating phrase “if we must die,” with its sonorous spondee.
Archive 2008-10-01 Lemon Hound 2008
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This is the only instance where Catullus has introduced a spondee into the second foot of the phalaecian, which then becomes decasyllabic.
Poems and Fragments 2006
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