caesura

/sɪˈzjʊəɹə/

caesura means A pause or interruption in a poem, music, building, or other work of art.

caesura is pronounced /sɪˈzjʊəɹə/.

Why “caesura” is a great word

A deliberate pause or break within a line of verse, typically marked by punctuation, to shape rhythm and meaning. From Latin caesura, meaning 'a cutting' or 'metrical pause,' from the verb caedere ('to cut'), first attested in English in the 1550s. Unlike enjambment, which carries a thought fluidly over a line break, or a simple rest in music, a caesura is a calculated fracture within a metrical unit itself. It is the comma after 'stopping' in Frost's woods, the stark silence between two halves of a thought, the suspended moment where a line turns upon itself—an interruption so precise it becomes architecture, proving that what is cut away speaks as loudly as what remains.

noun

A pause or interruption in a poem, music, building, or other work of art.
Using two words to divide a metrical foot.
The caesura mark ‖ or ||.
A break of an era or other measure of history and time; where one era ends and another begins; turning point.

Words closest in meaning

By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.

scansion 88% match — The rhythm or meter of a line or verse. vs caesura →
enjamb 88% match — To carry a sentence over to the next line without a pause. vs caesura →
hemistich 87% match — An approximate half-line of verse, separated from another by a caesura, often for dramatic effect. vs caesura →
pentameter 85% match — A line in a poem having five metrical feet. vs caesura →
stanza 84% match — A unit of a poem, written or printed as a paragraph; equivalent to a verse. vs caesura →
antepenult 84% match — The third-to-last syllable of a word. vs caesura →
alexandrine 83% match — A line of poetic meter having twelve syllables, usually divided into two or three equal parts. vs caesura →
anacrusis 83% match — An unstressed syllable at the start of a verse. vs caesura →