a repeated sound pattern in poetry, consisting of one long sound followed by two short sounds, as in the word 'carefully' (dactylus, from daktylos (because of the length of the three finger-joints))
a metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones / ' ~ ~ / Examples of dactylic words are "comedy" and "higgledy," and of largely dactylic poems Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Thomas Hood's "The Bridge of Sighs " Longfellow's Evangeline is written in dactylic hexameter, the metre of Homer and of Ovid's Metamorphoses
A metrical foot of three syllables, one long (or stressed) followed by two short (or unstressed), as in happily The dactyl is the reverse of the anapest
A three-syllable foot consisting of a heavy stress and two light stresses See meter Examples of words that constitute dactyls include notable, horrible, and parable