Definition of "anapest" []

• A metrical foot composed of two short syllables followed by one long one, as in the word seventeen. (noun)
• A line of verse using this meter; for example, "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house” ( Clement Clarke Moore). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "That verse wherein the accent falls on every third syllable, may be called trisyllabic verse; it is equivalent to what has been called anapestic; and we will still use the term anapest to express two unaccented and one accented syllable."
• "The emphasis of the rhyme, coming as it does after the rushing anapest, is to settle the word ‘knew’ much deeper in the voice than the word ‘yew.’"
• "The first two iambs are followed by something almost like a qualitative anapest (in English we do meter based on stress, and here the stress falls on the first syllable of grandeur; in Greek and Latin the stress is based on quality = the length of the syllable, and you can see how much longer than ‘with’ and ‘the’ is the ‘grand’ of grandeur)."