An
iamb or
iambus is a
metrical foot used in various types of
poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the
quantitative meter of
classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable (as in "delay"). This terminology was adopted in the description of
accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-bove).