Words & WritingGreek → English
Metre
/ˈmiːtər/noun
The rhythmic pattern of a line of verse; also the base unit of length in the metric system.
The Greek roots
μέτρον
métron
measure
Literally: “a measure”
Follow a root:μέτρον47 words
The story of the word
English borrowed this word twice, a thousand years apart. Poetic metre arrived before the Norman Conquest through Latin metrum, for the measured beat of a line. The unit came from French in the 1790s, when the new metre was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator on the meridian through Paris. Both senses are the same Greek noun, and both are about counting something that repeats.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- before 1100
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
metricsymmetrygeometrydiameterbarometer
In a sentence
Read it aloud and the metre tells you where the stress falls.
The pool is fifty metres, so the counting is easy.