Dactyl
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A metrical foot of three syllables (— ⏑ ⏑), one long followed by two short, or one accented followed by two unaccented.
"Now the Bard, glad to get an audience, […] / stuck fast with his first hexameter, / Not one of all whose gouty feet would stir. // But ere the spavin'd dactyls could be spurr'd / Into recitative, in great dismay / Both cherubim and seraphim were heard / To murmur loudly through their long array; […]"
- 2 a finger or toe in human beings or corresponding body part in other vertebrates wordnet
- 3 a metrical unit with stressed-unstressed-unstressed syllables wordnet
Example
More examples"Ida was the second asteroid to be observed close-up by a spacecraft, when the Space Probe Galileo took pictures as it flew by on Aug 28, 1993. These pictures showed not only that Ida has a cratered surface, but also that it has a small moon, called Dactyl, which is about 1.6 x 1.2 km in diameter and orbiting 90 km away from the asteroid."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin dactylus, from Ancient Greek δάκτυλος (dáktulos, “finger”), three bones of the finger corresponding to three syllables. Doublet of dactylus and date.
Related phrases
More for "dactyl"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.