MEASURE, in a legal and commercial sense, denotes a certain quantity or proportion of any thing bought, sold, valued, or the like. See WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.
MEASURE is also used to signify the cadence and time observed in poetry, dancing, and music, in order to render them regular and agreeable.
The different measures or metres in poetry, are the different manners of ordering and combining the quantities, or the long and short syllables. Thus, hexameter, pentameter, iambic, saphic, and other verses, consist of different measures.
In English verses, the measures are extremely various and arbitrary, every poet being at liberty to introduce any new form that he pleases. The most usual are the heroic, generally consisting of five long and five short syllables; verses of four feet; and verses of three feet and a caesura, or single syllable.
The ancients, by variously combining and transposing their quantities, made a vast variety of different measures. Of words, or rather feet of two syllables, they formed a spondee, consisting of two long syllables; a pyrrhic, of two short syllables; a trochee, of a long and a short syllable; and an iambic, of a short and a long syllable.
Of their feet of three syllables they formed a molossus, consisting of three long syllables; a tribrachys, of three short syllables; a dactyl, of one long and two short syllables; and an anapest, of two short and one long syllable. The Greek poets contrived one hundred and twenty-four different combinations or measures, under as many different names, from feet of two syllables to those of six.
MEASURE of an angle, is an arch described from the vertex in any place between its legs. Hence angles are distinguished by the ratio of the arches, described from the vertex between the legs to the peripheries. Angles, then, are distinguished by those arches; and the arches are dis-
Measure distinguished by their ratio to the periphery. Thus an angle is said to be as many degrees as there are in the said arch.
Math. MEASURE of a solid, is a cube, the side of which is an inch, a foot, or a yard, or any other determinate length. In geometry it is a cubic perch, divided into cubic feet, digits, &c.