In phonology, syncope (/ˈsɪŋkəpi/; from Ancient Greek: συγκοπή, romanized: sunkopḗ, lit.
Synchronic analysis studies linguistic phenomena at one moment of a language's history, usually the present, in contrast to diachronic analysis, which studies a language's states and the patterns of change across a historical timeframe.
In modern languages, syncope occurs in inflection, poetry, and informal speech.
Sounds may be removed from the interior of a word as a rhetorical or poetic device: for embellishment or for the sake of the meter.
In historical phonology, the term "syncope" is often limited to the loss of an unstressed vowel, in effect collapsing the syllable that contained it: trisyllabic Latin calidus (stress on first syllable) develops as bisyllabic caldo in several Romance languages.