Prosody (Greek) in the context of Short syllable

In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical Indo-European verse, as developed in Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line.

Biceps is a point in a metrical pattern where a pair of short syllables can freely be replaced by a long one. In Greek and Latin poetry, it is found in the dactylic hexameter and the first half of a dactylic pentameter, and also in anapaestic metres.

It is not to be confused with resolution, which is a phenomenon where a normally long syllable in a line is sometimes replaced by two shorts. Resolution is typically found in an iambic metre such as the iambic trimeter or a trochaic metre such as the trochaic septenarius.