foot

foot (plural feet)a group of syllables taken as a unit of poetic metre intraditional prosody, regardless of word‐boundaries. As applied to English verse, the foot is a certain fixed combination of syllables, each of which is counted as being either stressed (•) or unstressed (∘); but in Greek and Latin quantitative verse, from which the various names of feet are derived, it is a combination of long (–) and short (∪) syllables. While the concept of the foot is clearly applicable to the quantitative principles of Greek and Latin verse, its widespread use in the analysis of the very different stress‐based patterns of English verse is often very unhelpful and misleading, especially in accentual verse. It is worth remembering that the foot is only an abstract unit of analysis in scansion, not a substantial rhythmic entity. The most common feet in English prosody are the iamb (∘•: to be) and the trochee (•∘: beat it); these disyllabic or ‘duple’ feet are the units of metrical lines described asiambic and trochaic respectively, according to the perceived predominance of one or other foot in the line. Less common in English are the trisyllabic or ‘triple’ feet known as the dactyl (•∘∘: heavenly) and the anapaest (∘∘•: to the wall); again, these feet when predominant in a line give their names to dactylic and anapaestic metres. Two other feet are sometimes referred to in English prosody, although they do not form the basis for whole lines: these are the spondee (••: home‐made) and the pyrrhic (∘∘: in a), which are both regarded as devices of metrical substitution. There are several other Greek quantitative feet, for which equivalents are occasionally found or fabricated in English: these include the amphibrach (∪ – ∪), the amphimacer or cretic (– ∪ –), the choriamb (– ∪ ∪ –), the ionic (∪ ∪ – – or – – ∪ ∪), the paeon (– ∪ ∪ ∪ or ∪ ∪ ∪ –), and the epitrite (– ∪ – – or – – ∪–). In traditional prosody, it is the number of feet in a line that determines the description of its length: thus a line of four feet is called a tetrameter, while a line of five feet is a pentameter.

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A unit of rhythm or meter, the division in verse of a group of syllables, one of which is long or accented. For example, the line, "The boy - stood on - the burn - ing deck," has four iambic metrical feet. The fundamental components of the foot are the arsis and the thesis. The most common poetic feet used in English verse are the iamb, anapest, trochee, dactyl and spondee, while in classical verse there are 28 different feet. The other metrical feet are the amphibrach, antibacchius, antispast, bacchius, choriamb, cretic, diiamb, dispondee, dochmius, molossus, proceleusmatic, pyrrhic and tribrach, plus two variations of the ionic, four variations of the epitrite, and four variations of the pæon. The structure of a poetic foot does not necessarily correspond to word divisions, but is determined in context by the feet which surround it.

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