Word.ws English Dictionary

dactile

dactile is the obsolete form of dactyl.

Meaning of dactyl

Noun

dactyl (plural dactyls)

  1. A metrical foot of three syllables of the shape | – ⏖ |
    • Now the Bard, glad to get an audience, […] / stuck fast with his first hexameter, / Not one of all whose gouty feet would stir. // But ere the spavin'd dactyls could be spurr'd / Into recitative, in great dismay / Both cherubim and seraphim were heard / To murmur loudly through their long array; […]1822 October 15, Quevedo Redivivus [pseudonym; Lord Byron], “The Vision of Judgment”, in The Liberal. Verse and Prose from the South, 2nd edition, volume I, number I, London: […] John Hunt, […]...
  2. In qualitative metre, a foot with a stressed first syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.
  3. In quantitative metre, a foot with a long first syllable followed by two short syllables.
  4. (transferred sense) An excerpt of poetry or verse using this metre.

Forms of dactile

pluraldactiles

Questions about dactile

What is dactile the obsolete form of?
Dactile is the obsolete form of dactyl.

Words near dactile in the dictionary

  1. dacryorrhea
  2. dacryorrhœa
  3. dacryostenosis
  4. dacryphilia
  5. DACs
  6. dactile
  7. dactiles
  8. dactinomicine
  9. dactinomycin
  10. dactyl
  11. dactyl-

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dactile (page history and authors); dactyl (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: “dactile.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dactile. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.