Word.ws English Dictionary

iambic shortening

iambic shortening noun: in Latin, the shortening of an etymologically long final vowel, in a two-syllable word where the first vowel is also short. It tended to persist in uninflected words like bene, but was levelled out in favour of inflectional regularity in other words.

Noun

iambic shortening (countable and uncountable, plural iambic shortenings)

  1. In Latin, the shortening of an etymologically long final vowel, in a two-syllable word where the first vowel is also short. It tended to persist in uninflected words like bene, but was levelled out in favour of inflectional regularity in other words.

Forms of iambic shortening

pluraliambic shortenings

Questions about iambic shortening

What does iambic shortening mean?
Iambic shortening means in Latin, the shortening of an etymologically long final vowel, in a two-syllable word where the first vowel is also short. It tended to persist in uninflected words like bene, but was levelled out in favour of inflectional regularity in other words.
What part of speech is iambic shortening?
Iambic shortening is a noun.
What is the plural of iambic shortening?
The plural of iambic shortening is iambic shortenings.

Words near iambic shortening in the dictionary

  1. iambelegus
  2. iambi
  3. iambic
  4. iambic pentameter
  5. iambic pentameters
  6. iambic shortening
  7. iambic shortenings
  8. iambic tetrameter
  9. iambical
  10. iambically
  11. iambick

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: iambic shortening (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: “iambic shortening.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/iambic_shortening. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.