polysyllable

Spite is a little word; but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings, and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.

She could have informed you that there was such a word as "polygamy," and being also acquainted with "polysyllable," she had deduced the conclusion that "poly" mean "many"; but she had had no idea that gypsies were not well supplied with groceries, and her thoughts generally were the oddest mixture of clear-eyed acumen and blind dreams.

The first project was, to shorten discourse, by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because, in reality, all things imaginable are but norms.

In some of his works, especially 'The Rambler,' where, it has been jocosely suggested, he was exercising the polysyllables that he wished to put into his 'Dictionary,' he does employ a stilted Latinized vocabulary and a stilted style, with too much use of abstract phrases for concrete ones, too many long sentences, much inverted order, and over-elaborate balance.

The adverse destinies ordained that one evening Mr Wegg's labouring bark became beset by polysyllables, and embarrassed among a perfect archipelago of hard words.

The otherwise forgettable plot included Clive Owen, as an alcoholic poet and plagiarising English teacher, badgering Binoche into playing his show-off polysyllable game: "I'll give you a five-syllable word, you give me one of six syllables."

By counting the number of words of more than two syllables (polysyllable count) in 30 sentences, he provides this simple formula:

The only polysyllable in the stanza, it also inverts the poem's iambic metrical pattern.

This is often the case with words of four or more syllables, but phrasal analysis reveals that a string of unstressed monosyllables usually will mimic the stress patterning of a polysyllable. In other words, the forces that determine the rhythmic profile of any Italian utterance are independent of lexical structure.

Berg (1989) reinforces this point by suggesting that unstressed initial syllables may be treated as a 'phonological appendix' to an onset-rime (disyllable) or onset-superrime (polysyllable) division (see Figure 2).