Words & WritingGreek → English
Pentameter
/pɛnˈtæmɪtər/noun
A line of verse containing five metrical feet.
The Greek roots
πέντε
pénte
five
μέτρον
métron
measure
Literally: “five measures”
The story of the word
The Greek pentameter was not the English one. Theirs was a dactylic line paired with a hexameter to form the elegiac couplet, the metre of epitaphs and love poems. English borrowed the label and applied it to a five-beat iambic line the Greeks never wrote, which is how Shakespeare ended up writing in a Greek measure with a Greek name and almost no Greek in it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
hexameterdiametermetronomesymmetry
In a sentence
Most of the play is in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Count the stresses and you will find five to the line.