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Oxytone

Prosody
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

A word whose stress falls on the final syllable (e.g., “divine,” “reveal”), often used in poetic meter to create rhythmic variation.

Detailed Definition
Oxytone words, also called "paroxytone," end with primary stress, such as "alive," "between," or "guitar," contrasting with the more common paroxytone pattern in English. In poetry, oxytone words create rhythmic effects and tonal qualities distinct from the language's natural stress patterns; using oxytones allows poets to reverse expectations, create metrical complications, or emphasize final syllables, adding sophistication and surprise to their verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Greek tragedy, words like “poíēsis” (with stress on the final syllable) are oxytone and often placed at line ends for emphasis; In Latin poetry, “amās” (you love) is oxytone and used in elegiac couplets to close lines with emotional weight; In English, though rare, oxytone words like “idea” (in some pronunciations) appear in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being”; In Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” “day-wielder” may be read as oxytone to match sprung rhythm; In Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” ends with the oxytone “yield” (in some dialects stressed on the single syllable, but technically monosyllabic—better: in Spanish-influenced English poetry, words like “café” are oxytone); In classical metrics, oxytone words avoid elision at line endings in Greek hexameter.
Additional Notes
An oxytone is a word with stress on its final syllable (e.g., "hotel," "machine"). In prosody, oxytone words influence line endings and metrical resolution—especially in rhymed verse, where they often form masculine rhymes (single-syllable or final-stressed rhymes). In classical quantitative meter, oxytone words affect syllable length and cadence. Misplacing stress on an oxytone can disrupt meter, so scansion must account for lexical stress patterns. Related terms include paroxytone (stress on penultimate syllable) and proparoxytone (stress on antepenultimate).
Also Known As
oxytonic word
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