scansion

/ˈskæn.ʃən/

scansion noun: the rhythm or meter of a line or verse.

Noun

scansion (countable and uncountable, plural scansions)

scansion (third-person singular simple present scansions, present participle scansioning, simple past and past participle scansioned)

(transitive) Of text, to put into a rhythmic form or meter.
- Many of my doggerels are scansioned from letters I've written to these children while they were incarcerated in those warehouses for the minority nuisance, laughingly called correctional facilities.2000, Don Pirata, Cark and Moil, →ISBN
- It is “mannered through and through” or, in Karl Kraus's notorious harangue, little more than “scansioned journalism” — an “artful stage-prop in the shopping window of a pastry shop or a feuilleton writer.2002, Angela Esterhammer, Romantic Poetry, →ISBN, page 448
(broadly, transitive) To impose patterns on.
- The fine zigzag and diagonal interweavings, the nuances of varying intervals between the scansioned dots, show the enormous time and effort Polke invested in his complex, manual transfer method.1999, Margit Rowell, Michael Semff, Bice Curiger, Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper 1963-1974, →ISBN, page 27
- And it saw the concept of an historical time in linear development as depriving it of the reassuring repetitions of a circular form of chronology that was connected to the seasons and to the cycle of agricultural work; which in turn was scansioned by rituals that reasserted its continuity with the...2003, Luigi Zoja, Growth and Guilt: Psychology and the Limits of Development, →ISBN, page 106

Noun
plural	scansions
Verb
third-person singular present	scansions
present participle	scansioning
past participle	scansioned
past	scansioned

From Late Latin scansiōnem, accusative singular of scansiō (“the act of climbing”), from scandō (“to climb”).

What does scansion mean?: Scansion means the rhythm or meter of a line or verse.
What is scansion in Urdu?: Scansion in Urdu is تقطیع (taqtī'). See Scansion meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is scansion?: Scansion can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce scansion?: Scansion is pronounced /ˈskæn.ʃən/ (UK).
What is the plural of scansion?: The plural of scansion is scansions.

Adapted from Wiktionary: scansion (page history and authors); تقطیع (Urdu) (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-scansion.wav.

Cite this entry: “scansion.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scansion. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.