noun ·2 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   In Indian music, the smallest rhythmic unit of a tala.
2. 2
   In Indian poetics and linguistics, a measure of the length of a syllable; equivalent to mora.
3. 3
   The characteristic horizontal line drawn above characters in some Indic scripts.
4. 4
   An intra-syllabic vowel symbol in Indic scripts.

Etymology

Borrowed from Sanskrit मात्रा (mātrā, “measure, small quantity”).

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.