Old English metre Old English metre Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is "Beowulf", but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition. The most salient feature of Old English poetry is its heavy use of alliteration. The basic Anglo-Saxon poetic line consists of two half-lines, connected by alliteration. This means that there is a word or syllable in the second half-line, which will alliterate with one or more important words or
Longest word in English likely to be encountered in general text are "deinstitutionalization" and "counterrevolutionaries", with 22 letters each. A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is "uncharacteristically", at 20 letters. The word "internationalization" is abbreviated "i18n", the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last. In his play "Assemblywomen" ("Ecclesiazousae"), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients: Henry Carey's farce