Where Does Iambic Pentameter Come From?

Oddly enough, although the term "iambic pentameter" refers to a metrical pattern written in English, the term itself originates from Greek! How does THAT work? Gretchen McCullogh of Slate breaks it down for us:

If you paid any attention at all in high school English, you probably remember iambic pentameter, most likely from reading Shakespeare, and perhaps even other meters like trochaic tetrameter (the meter of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, among other things). And if you had an English teacher who was especially instructive in etymology, you may have learned that iambic pentameter takes its name from several Greek roots that translate roughly as "five metrical feet." But wait. Greek and English meter don’t work in the same way, so how did we come to use Greek poetic terminology to describe English verse?

First off, we come by Ancient Greek metrical tradition, like marble statues and democracy, by way of the Romans. Fortunately, Greek and Latin share a few linguistic traits that made it relatively easy to borrow from one to the other. Both languages, for example, have a contrast between long and short vowels: es means "you are" in Latin while ēs means "you eat" (the ē is held for about twice as long as the e). For poetry, syllables with a short vowel and no consonant after it are "light," while syllables with a long vowel and/or a subsequent consonant are "heavy." Greek and Latin poetry, then, are based on the organization of light and heavy syllables into feet. For example, light-heavy is an iamb, heavy-light is a trochee, heavy-light-light is a dactyl, and so on.

The terms make sense in Greek: iamb comes from iaptein "to assail" (in words), literally "to put forth," since it was the meter of comic verses, while trochee comes from trokhaios (pous), literally "a running (foot)," from trekhein "to run." Dactyl is related to the word for finger, because heavy-light-light is like three joints, while anapest is literally "strike backwards," because light-light-heavy is the reverse of a dactyl. And of course the numbers—trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, etc.—are all from the Greek numerals.

Sharpen your pencils and read more at Slate.