Alexandrine introduce phrasal accentuation, or rigorously observe the medial caesura, as in French." Common usage within the literatures of European languages is broader still, embracing lines syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and (inevitably) stationed ambivalently between the two; lines of 12, 13, or even 14 syllables; lines with obligatory, predominant, and optional caesurae. Although alexandrines occurred in French verse as early as the 12th century, they were slightly looser rhythmically, and vied with the "décasyllabe" and "octosyllabe" for cultural prominence and use in various genres. "The alexandrine came into its own in the middle of the sixteenth century with the poets of the Pléiade
Syllabic verse in one verse tradition will typically not fit in another. Humans can perceive the number of members in a small set without actually counting them or mentally breaking them into subsets; the upper limit of this ability is estimated at between 5 and 9 units, and this seems to hold true in sequences of audible stimuli (e.g. syllables in a line of verse); so it is no surprise that syllabic hemistichs tend to be very short (typically 4 to 8 syllables), and to be grouped — and therefore separated from their neighbors — by markers such as stress, word boundary,