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Glite Dictionary
proparoxytone

proparoxytone

9.9
A word with the main stress on the third last syllable
  • noun
  • /ˌproʊpəˈrɑːksɪˌtoʊn/
  • Specialized
: proparoxítona
  • Many proparoxytone words in Spanish, such as 'murciélago', have their accent marked to indicate the stress position.

Examples

  • The word 'mathematics' is a proparoxytone because the stress is on the antepenultimate syllable.

  • We also note at this point the application of the Latin stress rule to the originally proparoxytone * (This character cannot be represented in ASCII text.) to produce suringa, later siringa.

    Academic text (1993)

  • In the word 'caterpillar', the stress falls on the third-last syllable, making it a proparoxytone.

Surface Forms

proparoxytone singular
proparoxytones plural

Morphology

proparoxytone = paroxytone (opaque) = pro + paroxytone + pro

Formed by prefixing 'pro-' to the technical term 'paroxytone'; the components are specialist prosody terms unlikely to be known by an average B1 learner, so the meaning is not transparently inferable.

Etymology

Proparoxytone comes from the parts pro- ('before') and -tone ('tone' or 'stress'), where pro- is the same 'before' in prologue. So a proparoxytone is a word whose stress falls on the 'third-last' syllable.