A type of metrical foot used in classical poetry, consisting of four long syllables or equivalent, often with variations in stress patterns.
From Greek 'epitritos' meaning 'one and one-third,' referring to the proportional length of this metrical unit. The term comes from ancient Greek prosody and was adopted into Latin poetic terminology.
Ancient Greek poets were obsessed with mathematical precision in their verses—an epitrite is literally 4/3 the length of a basic unit, which means poets had to count syllables the way modern songwriters count beats.
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