cheville
/ʃəˈviː/
cheville noun: a word or phrase whose only function is to make a sentence metrically balanced.
Noun
cheville (plural chevilles)
- A word or phrase whose only function is to make a sentence metrically balanced.
- The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.1905, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Art of Writing
- The practice of using chevilles was very common in old Irish poetry, and a bad practice it was; for many a good poem is quite spoiled by the constant and wearisome recurrence of these chevilles.1910, Patrick Weston Joyce, English as we speak it in Ireland, chapter 5
Forms of cheville
| plural | chevilles |
|---|
Origin of cheville
Borrowed from French cheville. Doublet of clavicle.
Words that rhyme with cheville
Questions about cheville
- What does cheville mean?
- Cheville means a word or phrase whose only function is to make a sentence metrically balanced.
- What part of speech is cheville?
- Cheville is a noun.
- How do you pronounce cheville?
- Cheville is pronounced /ʃəˈviː/.
- What is the plural of cheville?
- The plural of cheville is chevilles.
Words near cheville in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cheville (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “cheville.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cheville. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.