Home › Glossary › Letter T

typographic break

Structure
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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 deliberate visual interruption in a poem’s typography—such as spacing, indentation, or line gaps—that signals shifts in thought, time, voice, or emotion.

Detailed Definition
A typographic break is a deliberate visual interruption in a poem’s layout—such as extra spacing, indentation shifts, or line gaps—that signals a pause, shift in tone, perspective, or time; unlike syntactic breaks, typographic breaks rely on spatial arrangement to guide reader interpretation and emotional pacing.
Example
Example in poetry:
A stanza ending mid-sentence followed by a blank line before the next stanza resumes the thought; A line concluding with an em dash and a full line break before continuation; A poem where a line ends with “I saw—” and the next stanza begins on a new page with “nothing”; A verse where punctuation halts the line visually but the syntax continues after a typographic gap
Additional Notes
typographic break|A visual interruption in the flow of the poem on the page, such as extra line spacing, a symbol (∗), or unusual indentation, that signals a pause, a shift in thought, or a change in time/setting; a non-linguistic structural device.
Also Known As
Typographic rupture Visual break Print gap And-sign break Asterism break
Skip to main content