disyllabic

Updated: May 24, 2025

In this first book he ends the pentameter freely with words of three, four, and five syllables; the monotony of the perpetual disyllabic termination, which afterwards became the normal usage, is hardly compensated by the increased smoothness which it gives the verse.

J. W. (John William) Mackail - Latin Literature

Partly, perhaps, as a result of her acquaintance with Italian literature, she had a marked fondness for disyllabic rhymes; and since pure rhymes of this kind are not plentiful in English, she tried the experiment of using assonances instead. Hence such rhymes as silence and islands, vision and procession, panther and saunter, examples which could be indefinitely multiplied if need were.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning - The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2)

Let us not, however, forget, that a people celebrated in remote antiquity, a people from whom the Greeks themselves borrowed knowledge, had perhaps a language, the construction of which recalls involuntarily that of the languages of America. What a structure of little monosyllabic and disyllabic forms is added to the verb and to the substantive, in the Coptic language!

Alexander von Humboldt - Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 — Volume 1

Chinese may be said to consist of a vast number of monosyllables, each expressed by a different ideograph, each having a distinct significance, and each capable of combination and permutation with one or more of the others, by which combinations and permutations disyllabic and trisyllabic words are obtained representing every conceivable shade of meaning.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era