Plural of cretic; multiple instances or examples of the long-short-long metrical foot used in poetry and verse analysis.
From cretic (the poetic foot) plus standard English plural -s. Each individual foot in a line of verse can be analyzed or discussed as a separate cretic.
When analyzing an ancient Greek poem line by line, scholars would mark each metrical unit—if several of those units were cretics, you'd have a collection of cretics to study.
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