Foot

The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic metre, usually thought to contain one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English are iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, spondaic, and pyrrhic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Metrical Feet" exemplifies the metre the first five, and of two classical measures, the amphibrach and the amphimacer (stressed feet are in boldface):

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long; --
With a leap and a bound the swift anapests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride; --
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.