In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in hemistichs (in hemistichomythia).
The Roman poet Virgil employed hemistichs in the Aeneid to indicate great duress in his characters, where they were incapable of forming complete lines due to emotional or physical pain, but more likely he never finished the poem.
In Old English and Old Norse poetry, each line of alliterative verse was divided into an "a-verse" and "b-verse" hemistich with a strong caesura between.
In Arabic and Persian poetry, a line of verse almost invariably consists of two hemistichs of equal length, forming a couplet.
In some kinds of Persian and Arabic poetry, known as mathnawi or masnavi, the two hemistichs of a line rhyme with the scheme AA BB CC DD.