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hollow

Craft Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Hollow means empty inside or carved out; in poetry, it can suggest vacancy, echo, depth, or a shape made by removing substance.

Detailed Definition
In literal craft, hollow describes a space or cavity, often formed by carving or erosion. In poetry, the term may carry emotional weight, suggesting absence, loneliness, or the resonant interior of an image. It belongs to craft terms because it links form to the space created within form.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet may describe a hollow tree as a symbol of lost vitality or spiritual emptiness; Hollowed-out buildings after war appear in poems as stark images of destruction and absence; A poem about grief might describe a hollow feeling in the chest to convey emotional numbness; Hollow bones of birds can serve as a metaphor for lightness and freedom in nature poetry; A poet describing a cave might use hollowness to evoke mystery or the unconscious mind; Hollow promises appear in satirical poetry to critique insincerity or empty rhetoric.
Additional Notes
Hollow suggests emptiness, absence, or a shape created by removal, making it a rich term for discussing poems about grief, spiritual emptiness, or physical devastation; the term can describe both literal hollowed spaces, like caves or hollowed trees, and figurative emotional hollowness, and instructors might explore how hollow imagery often carries acoustic implications as well, since hollow spaces tend to echo, linking emptiness to resonance and amplified sound within a poem's imagery.
Also Known As
carve out excavate scoop gouge dene gleann Tempe combe
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