scansion

/ˈskæn.ʃən/

Etymology

From Late Latin scansiōnem, accusative singular of scansiō (“the act of climbing”), from scandō (“to climb”).

Why this word is great

SCANSION — [Noun] The analysis or marking of the metrical structure of verse. From Late Latin scansiōnem, accusative singular of scansiō ("the act of climbing"), from Latin scandō ("to climb"), as if ascending the ladder of syllables. Unlike "prosody" (which surveys the broad landscape of poetic rhythm) or "cadence" (which rides the wave of natural speech), scansion is a meticulous dissection, a forensic unspooling of stressed and unstressed beats. It is the scholar’s pencil hovering over iambs and trochees, the faint pencil marks dividing a sonnet into orderly feet, or the slow, deliberate recitation of a line until its hidden skeleton clicks into place—the quiet labor of turning music back into mathematics.

noun

The rhythm or meter of a line or verse.
The act of analyzing the meter of poetry.

verb

Of text, to put into a rhythmic form or meter.“Many of my doggerels are scansioned from letters I've written to these children while they were incarcerated in those warehouses for the minority nuisance, laughingly called correctional facilities.”
To impose patterns on.“The fine zigzag and diagonal interweavings, the nuances of varying intervals between the scansioned dots, show the enormous time and effort Polke invested in his complex, manual transfer method.”