metrical foot

The foot is the basic metrical unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few variations, by the sound pattern the foot represents. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. Contrasting with stress-timed languages such as English, in syllable-timed languages such as French, a foot is a single syllable.