stichometry
Nov. 9th, 2012 07:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordstichometry (sti-KOHM-uh-tree) - n., the counting the number of lines in a manuscript or book; the writing of a manuscript in lines of standard length; the writing of a prose text into lines broken at pauses in sense.
The first has been important ever since books started to be copied for others, and was still being done twenty years ago before publishers to fully electronic production methods. The second was important when the copying was done by hand, so that the scribes could be paid comparably -- in ancient Greece, the standard line was about 36 characters, the average length of a Homeric hexameter line, a measure used even when the text was prose, while in ancient Rome it was the the average Virgilian hexameter. The third was important (when there wasn't a need to measure how much to pay the scribe) before punctuation was invented to help readers parse where the clauses ended. All senses derrive from Greek stikhometria, from stikhos, row + metria, measure.
---L.
The first has been important ever since books started to be copied for others, and was still being done twenty years ago before publishers to fully electronic production methods. The second was important when the copying was done by hand, so that the scribes could be paid comparably -- in ancient Greece, the standard line was about 36 characters, the average length of a Homeric hexameter line, a measure used even when the text was prose, while in ancient Rome it was the the average Virgilian hexameter. The third was important (when there wasn't a need to measure how much to pay the scribe) before punctuation was invented to help readers parse where the clauses ended. All senses derrive from Greek stikhometria, from stikhos, row + metria, measure.
---L.
