A verse of six feet, the first four of which may be either dactyls or spondees, the fifth must regularly be a dactyl, and the sixth always a spondee. In this species of verse are composed the Iliad of Homer and the Æneid of Virgil. In English hexameters accent takes the place of quantity.
Having six metrical feet, especially dactyls and spondees.
a poetic line containing six units, often broken into two groupings of three beats.
A verse of poetry consisting of six (hex Gk.) metra in a row. The term is sometimes used as shorthand for the dactylic hexameter itself.
a line of poetry with six feet: "She comes, | she comes | again, | like ring | dove frayed | and fled" (Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes).
a verse line having six metrical feet
A line of verse consisting of six metrical feet; the term, however, is usually used for dactylic hexameter, consisting of dactyls and spondees, the meter in which the Greek and Latin epics were written. Sidelight: A hexameter is called an Alexandrine when it is iambic or trochaic in its English version.(See Meter) (See also Poulter's Measure)
A line of poetry that has six metrical feet.
A line containing six metrical 'feet'. An example of an iambic hexameter is the last line of each stanza of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser.
Hexameter is a literary and poetic form, consisting of six metrical feet per line as in the Iliad. It was the standard epic metre of both the Greeks and the Romans, and was used in other types of composition too -- in Horace's satires, for instance, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe.
