1. a metrical foot consisting of three syllables with the pattern long-short-long or stressed-unstressed-stressed
Usage: poetry; prosody

Examples

• The poet used a cretic foot to create a distinctive rhythm in the verse.
• In classical prosody, a cretic consists of a long syllable, a short syllable, and another long syllable.
• The word ‘beautiful’ can be scanned as a cretic in English poetry.
• Students of meter learn to identify cretics alongside iambs and trochees.
• The cretic foot appears frequently in Greek and Latin poetry.
• Modern poets sometimes employ cretics to vary their rhythmic patterns.