The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry.
[1] The foot might be compared to a bar, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in musical notation.
The Greeks recognised three basic types of feet, the iambic (where the ratio of arsis to thesis was 1:2), the dactylic (where it was 2:2) and the paeonic (where it was 3:2).
In some kinds of metre, such as the Greek iambic trimeter, two feet are combined into a larger unit called a metron (pl.
[citation needed] Below listed are the names given to the poetic feet by classical metrics.