cheville means A word or phrase whose only function is to make a sentence metrically balanced. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 87 out of 100.
cheville is pronounced /ʃəˈviː/.
Why “cheville” is a great word
CHEVILLE — [Noun] A word or phrase inserted into a line of verse solely to meet the demands of its meter, not its meaning. Borrowed from French cheville (“peg, pin, ankle”), from Latin clāvicula, a diminutive of clāvis (“key”), making it a doublet of clavicle. Unlike “filler,” which idly occupies conversational space, or the grammatical “expletive,” which serves a syntactic void, a cheville is a deliberate, minor carpentry of verse. It is the extra syllable tapped in like a wooden peg, the forced “lo!” bridging a rhythmic gap, or the padded epithet stretching a name to fit a heroic couplet—the audible scar where craft concedes to constraint.
Etymology
Borrowed from French cheville. Doublet of clavicle.
noun
- A word or phrase whose only function is to make a sentence metrically balanced.“The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.”