Word of the Day:
villanelle
What It Means
A type of poem, consisting of five tercets and one quatrain, with only two rhymes.
Villanelle in Context
“By definition the villanelle is restrictive, because it demands nineteen lines on two rhymes in six stanzas, the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the end of the concluding quatrain.”
Did You Know?
From the French villanelle, from Italian villanella, from villano (“peasant”), from Latin vīllānus (“farmhand”), from vīlla (“estate”). The origin references the pastoral themes originally associated with this form.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: villanelle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “villanelle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/villanelle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
