A tribrach is a metrical foot used in formal poetry and Greek and Latin verse. In quantitative meter (such as the meter of classical verse), it consists of three short syllables; in accentual-syllabic verse (such as formal English verse), the tribrach consists of a run of three short syllables substituted for a trochee. A "tribrach word" is a word consisting of three short syllables, such as Latin "shining" or Greek "you have". An English equivalent would be a word with three short syllables such as Canada or passenger. The origin of the word tribrach is the Greek , derived from the prefix - "three" and the adjective "short". Terminology The name is first recorded in the Roman writer Quintilian (1st century AD). According to Quintilian, an alternative name for a tribrach, was a "trochee": ("Three short syllables make a , but those who give the name to the prefer to call it a .") Quintilian himself referred to it as a . However, in modern usage a run of three short syllables is always called a tribrach, while the word trochee is used of a long + short (or heavy + light, or stressed + unstressed) sequence. Another name, mentioned in Diomedes Grammaticus (4th century AD) was . The Latin writer on metrics Terentianus Maurus (2nd century AD) noted that the long syllable of a trochaic foot (– u) was often resolved into two short syllables, "hence what we call a tribrach can also be called a ". He adds that a tribrach can also be found as a substitute for an iambic foot (u –) and in the first or second half of an (cretic) (– u –). The earliest mention of the word in a Greek writer recorded in Liddell and Scott's lexicon is in the grammarian Hephaestion (2nd century AD), who lists the tribrach among the possible forms which a trochaic foot could take. It was also known as "a tribrach foot". In Latin poetry In Latin poetry a tribrach is never found in the works of Virgil, Ovid, or Catullus, since the hexameter and hendecasyllable metres do not allow a series of more than two syllables. It is, however, fairly common in iambic and trochaic verse as used in Roman comedy in writers such as Plautus and Terence. In iambic and trochaic metres a tribrach can replace either an iamb (u –) or a trochee (–