A term you'll meet in prosody and meter.
A metrical foot is the basic building block of poetic meter: a small, repeating unit of stressed and unstressed syllables. English meter is built by stringing feet together, and naming the foot is the first step in describing a line's rhythm.
The iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (da-DUM): "belong." It's the natural heartbeat of English verse. Its reverse, the trochee, is stressed-then-unstressed (DUM-da): "garden." The spondee is two stressed syllables (DUM-DUM): "heart-break," used for weight and emphasis.
The anapest runs unstressed-unstressed-stressed (da-da-DUM): "in the night" — galloping, light. The dactyl reverses it, stressed-unstressed-unstressed (DUM-da-da): "tenderly" — falling, often elegiac.
A line's meter is named by its foot and the number of feet it contains: pentameter (five), tetrameter (four), trimeter (three), and so on. "Iambic pentameter" is therefore five iambs per line — the meter of Shakespeare and Milton. "Trochaic tetrameter" is four trochees, the driving beat of much chant and incantation.
Meter creates a baseline rhythm the ear expects — and poets get their effects by varying it. A trochee or spondee dropped into an iambic line jolts attention to exactly the word the poet wants you to feel. To hear those substitutions, you first have to know the feet.
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