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Definition of "catalectic" [cat•a•lec•tic]

  • Lacking one or more syllables, especially in the final foot. Used of verse. (adjective)

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.

Use "catalectic" in a sentence
  • "But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of classical prosody to a sort of _præmunire_, to hold up the hands in horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of catalepsy at the word catalectic -- to ransack the dictionary for unnatural words or uses of words like "catch," and "stop," and"
  • "May our canteens be festooned with canticles, our shoeshops filled with catalectic feet."
  • "” The former is trochaic—the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic."