Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as in season.
- noun A metrical foot in quantitative verse consisting of a long syllable followed by a short one.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In prosody, a foot of two syllables, the first long or accented and the second short or unaccented. The trochee of modern or accentual versification consists of an accented followed by an unaccented syllable.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Pros.) A foot of two syllables, the first long and the second short, as in the Latin word
ante , or the first accented and the second unaccented, as in the English wordmotion ; a choreus.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
metrical foot inverse consisting of a stressedsyllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a metrical unit with stressed-unstressed syllables
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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But he calls a trochee, which occupies the same time as a choreus, [Greek: kordax], because its contracted and brief character is devoid of dignity.
The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Who knew, for instance, that iambs an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one make feminine-sounding names, such as Chanel, while the reverse—called a trochee—has the masculine sound of Black & Decker?
The Soul of Brevity Daniel Akst 2011
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"trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and not quantity was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak of _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter," and _Evangeline_ in
A Study of Poetry Bliss Perry 1907
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Two dactyls, two trochees per line, if you count the first syllable of each line as a pickup held over from the last trochee.
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Of course the 'trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee pattern is only the vaguest approximation of quantitative metrics, but it nonetheless imposes (lyrical or playful) exigencies on the language of the poem that lead, in the best of cases, to discovery, directions to the poem unexpected even to the poet.
Anis Shivani: Poetry As a Bridge Across Cultures: Anis Shivani Interviews Marilyn Hacker Anis Shivani 2010
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Of course the 'trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee pattern is only the vaguest approximation of quantitative metrics, but it nonetheless imposes (lyrical or playful) exigencies on the language of the poem that lead, in the best of cases, to discovery, directions to the poem unexpected even to the poet.
Anis Shivani: Poetry As a Bridge Across Cultures: Anis Shivani Interviews Marilyn Hacker Anis Shivani 2010
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Of course the 'trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee pattern is only the vaguest approximation of quantitative metrics, but it nonetheless imposes (lyrical or playful) exigencies on the language of the poem that lead, in the best of cases, to discovery, directions to the poem unexpected even to the poet.
Anis Shivani: Poetry As a Bridge Across Cultures: Anis Shivani Interviews Marilyn Hacker Anis Shivani 2010
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Two dactyls, two trochees per line, if you count the first syllable of each line as a pickup held over from the last trochee.
-
Of course the 'trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee pattern is only the vaguest approximation of quantitative metrics, but it nonetheless imposes (lyrical or playful) exigencies on the language of the poem that lead, in the best of cases, to discovery, directions to the poem unexpected even to the poet.
Anis Shivani: Poetry As a Bridge Across Cultures: Anis Shivani Interviews Marilyn Hacker Anis Shivani 2010
-
Of course the 'trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee pattern is only the vaguest approximation of quantitative metrics, but it nonetheless imposes (lyrical or playful) exigencies on the language of the poem that lead, in the best of cases, to discovery, directions to the poem unexpected even to the poet.
Anis Shivani: Poetry As a Bridge Across Cultures: Anis Shivani Interviews Marilyn Hacker Anis Shivani 2010
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