spondee

Examples

• All

• "I realize that my name—Schegloff—" she pronounced it slowly, as a spondee, "—is difficult to pronounce and yet more difficult to spell, but please try."

  Fiction book (2001)

• To evaluate speech reception threshold, a test using a standard spondee word list was given to the same subject with the four ear plugs.

  Academic text (1995)

• On the level of the individual line of traditional accentual-syllabic meter, a spondee is a spondee because it is not an iamb or a trochee, and the same is true of a pyrrhic.

  Fiction book (2000)

• Immediately after programming in the variable mode, the patient was able to detect speech, discriminate differences in word pairs (as shown by a score of 62% on the Cochlear Corp. vowel identification test), and identify common spondee words in a closed set (score: 74% on the four-choice spondee test).

  Academic text (1999)

• In the line "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", the phrase "summer's day" forms a spondee with its stressed syllables.

• A spondee is often used in poetry to create a strong emphasis on certain phrases, like in "Dead as a door-nail."

• When reading Shakespeare, you might notice that many lines contain a spondee, which adds rhythm and intensity to his works.

Surface Forms

Etymology