paeon

(redirected from paeons)
Also found in: Encyclopedia.

pae·on

(pē′ən, -ŏn′)

In quantitative verse, a foot of one long syllable and three short syllables occurring in any order.

[Latin paeōn, from Greek paiōn, from paiān, paiōn, paean; see paean.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

paeon

(ˈpiːən)

(Poetry) prosody a metrical foot of four syllables, with one long one and three short ones in any order

[C17: via Latin paeon from Greek paiōn; variant of paean]

paeˈonic adj

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

pae•on

(ˈpi ən, -ɒn)

n.

(in classical prosody) a foot of one long and three short syllables in any order.

[1595–1605; < Latin paeōn < Greek paiṓn; see paean]

Mentioned in ?

poetry

References in classic literature ?

He was praying--raising his voice in thanksgiving at our deliverance--and had just completed a sort of paeon of gratitude that the thing couldn't climb a tree when without warning it reared up beneath him on its enormous tail and hind feet, and reached those fearfully armed paws quite to the branch upon which he crouched.

View in context

The son of Tydeus speared Agastrophus son of Paeon in the hip-joint with his spear.

As he spoke he began stripping the spoils from the son of Paeon, but Alexandrus husband of lovely Helen aimed an arrow at him, leaning against a pillar of the monument which men had raised to Ilus son of Dardanus, a ruler in days of old.

View in context

The sound texture is richly patterned throughout: the light i sounds of "pig," "tits," "id rips," "lipid," "syntax," and "winged" chiming with the repeated preposition "in," and the unaccented syllable of "Muslim." This is threaded against a pervasive interest in the o sound, long and short, which gathers full steam in "corticosteroidal" and "O common," and reaches a climax in "foxholes." The rhythm, beginning with those virtual back-to-back primus paeons, is tersely beaten against an underlying shift from trochaic to iambic feet, but constantly wrong-footing itself and jarring against all expectation.

Keston Sutherland, Poetical Works 1999-2015

These days we often hear paeons of praise at the political level for qualities that are not assessed in traditional international evaluation systems.

The collapse of political economy and the advent of unlearning society: what can we learn from the advent of political economy and the collapse of industrial society?

There were various paeons to labour and industry such as John Rigg's 'Labour Day' and Robert H.