Sentence examples for dactyl from inspiring English sources
noun
A poetical foot of three syllables (— ⏑ ⏑), one long followed by two short, or one accented followed by two unaccented.
Researchers now report what makes these appendages, called dactyl clubs, so powerful.
But whatever the reason, it behoves those unwilling to wait for websites to get their acts together to consider the alternatives to traditional passwords.Skysail dactyl gimcrack golemOne such is multi-word passwords called passphrases.
Dactylic metres are fairly rare in English verse, one difficulty being that the prolonged use of the dactyl tends to distort normal word accent, giving the lines a jerky movement.
It was composed of 12,109 lines written in dactylic hexameter (sometimes referred to as "Homeric hexameter")—that is, each line consisted of six feet, or metrical units, and each foot consisted of a dactyl (a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables).
Most, however, wrote in terms of six patterns that may be viewed as analogous to the simpler poetic metres—I (trochee), II (iamb), III (dactyl), IV (anapest), V (spondee), and VI (tribrach).
The commonest feet in English verse are the iamb, an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word ˘re| ´port; the trochee, a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable, as in the word ´dai|˘ly; the anapest, two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in ˘ser|e˘| ´nade; and the dactyl, a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in ´mer|˘ri|˘ly.
Now, metrical variation - exchanging an iamb for a trochee, for instance, or allowing in the odd dactyl - is a legitimate and necessary technique in verse: it breaks the monotony of line upon line of iambics and, at its best, the varied metre will in some way echo a change of pace, tone, direction or content in the line.
Hexameter, a line of verse containing six feet, usually dactyls.
Double dactyls, also called higgledy-piggledy, a light-verse form consisting of eight lines of two dactyls each, arranged in two stanzas.
Mitchell certainly gets the rapidity: this Iliad is by far the most swift-footed in recent memory, the iambic line driving forward in a way that gives force to the English and nicely suggests the galloping dactyls (long-short-short) of Homer's lines.
"Heroic Simile," which opens his second book, begins: When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle.
