Word.ws English Dictionary

common meter

common meter noun: a hymn metre characterized by a quatrain of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.

Noun

common meter (uncountable)

  1. A hymn metre characterized by a quatrain of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
    • The hymn “Amazing Grace” is in common meter.
    • The English band Crass sounded like a bag of rocks: scrabbly drum rolls, clanky guitars, no bass end, the words a jabbery Cockney caterwaul through endless stanzas of common meter.2008 January 13, Ben Ratliff, “Easy Slogans, Twinkly Funk and One Busy String”, in New York Times
    Synonyms:
    common measure

Synonyms of common meter

  • common measure

Forms of common meter

alternative formcommon metre

Questions about common meter

What does common meter mean?
Common meter means a hymn metre characterized by a quatrain of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
What part of speech is common meter?
Common meter is a noun.

Words near common meter in the dictionary

  1. common man
  2. Common Market
  3. common marmoset
  4. common marmosets
  5. common men
  6. common meter
  7. common milkwort
  8. common milkworts
  9. common millet
  10. common millets
  11. common minnow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: common meter (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: “common meter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/common_meter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.