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metre
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
metre
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
100 feet/30 metres etc high
▪ waves up to 40 metres high
▪ a ten-foot high statue
3 inches/1 metre etc in diameter
▪ Draw a circle six centimetres in diameter.
5 metres/3 feet etc in breadth
▪ The boat measured 15 feet in length and 4 feet in breadth.
a 3000 metres/10 km etc race
▪ He finished first in the 100 metres race.
a height of 2,500 feet/10,000 metres etc
▪ The aircraft was flying at a height of 10,000 metres.
a height of six feet/ten metres etc
▪ Sunflowers can grow to a height of 15 feet.
a metre/foot etc in depth (=deep)
▪ a channel of two feet in depth
an extra ten minutes/three metres etc
▪ I asked for an extra two weeks to finish the work.
cubic centimetre/metre/inch etc
▪ 75,000 million cubic metres of gas
five metres/two miles etc wide
▪ The river is more than fifty yards wide.
grow to/reach a length of 2 metres/8 feet etc
▪ A blue whale can reach a length of 100 feet.
have a length of 1 metre/2 feet etc
▪ These leaves have a length of about 7 cm.
six feet/ten metres etc in height
▪ None of these sculptures was less than three metres in height.
ten feet/five metres etc across
▪ The river is 2 kilometres across.
the 100/200 etc metres champion (=one in a running race)
▪ She's the world 3,000 metres champion.
three feet/two metres etc in width
▪ It’s about six metres in width.
two metres/three miles etc long
▪ The bridge is 140 feet long.
walk a mile/200 metres/a short distance etc
▪ We must have walked ten miles today.
▪ I walked all the way to San Rafael.
win by 10 points/ten metres etc
▪ We won by 23 points.
within a 10-mile/200-metre etc radius
▪ There are more than a dozen golf courses within a 15-mile radius of St Andrews.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
cubic
▪ You then need to multiply this by your company's charge for each cubic metre of water.
▪ Charges differ throughout the country but 40p per cubic metre is a rough guide.
▪ Levels of sulphur dioxide in the air reached 2,400 microgrammes per cubic metre over the weekend.
▪ If all goes to plan, the sail will collapse into a box less than a cubic metre in volume.
▪ The new limit is one billionth of a gram per cubic metre.
▪ The consultants reckon that pumping water from depths of 20 metres would cost less than 50 cents per cubic metre with solar power.
▪ We each drink about one cubic metre of water a year and use between 50 and 100 for domestic purposes.
square
▪ Researchers have found the soil to be infested with around 500 grubs per square metre instead of the usual five or so.
▪ Two years later their numbers were still no higher than 2,000 per square metre.
▪ The calendar below shows the 13 dazzling international exhibitions being held in the 12,000 square metre exhibition hall.
▪ Each aluminium can you collect will buy one square metre of tropical forest which will be preserved for future generations.
▪ They are present on every branch in a rainforest and every square metre of uncultivated soil.
▪ The project's treatments cost as little as 54p per square metre.
▪ Order the terrazzo by the square metre.
▪ Do we mean something like one sand grain every square metre of sea-floor per minute, per day, per year?
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
3 metres/5 miles etc short of sth
five feet/two metres etc square
square metre/mile etc
▪ A square mile of orchards shows no sign of anyone picking anything.
▪ Half a dozen females share a nest, a simple hollow within the square mile or so of a male's territory.
▪ Having lived in Deptford all his life, Albie knew every jabber, snorter, speed-freak and pot-head in sixteen square miles.
▪ It would cover four square miles and be the second biggest in the country.
▪ Researchers have found the soil to be infested with around 500 grubs per square metre instead of the usual five or so.
▪ The basins are scattered over 20,000 square miles and fed by underground rivers which extend through Nevada, Utah and California.
▪ The Buxton Springs are surrounded by 550 square miles of spectacular natural landscape.
▪ This system was probably capable of supporting about 400 people per square mile.
the 100-metres/400-metres hurdles
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Last night we camped a metre short of the border, a beautiful spot between the upper and lower Sorjus lakes.
▪ Prices start at about £100 per metre for standard models; fan-assisted convection designs are also available.
▪ Rivermen were surprised at the force of the bore on a 9.3 metre tide, nearly a metre below maximum at Sharpness.
▪ The doctors have said that she will not grow to more than a metre in height.
▪ The largest column, which was at Phaistos, had a diameter approaching 1 metre.
▪ The mature shell size also varies from small species a few centimetres across to giants of a metre or more in diameter.
▪ The pit was about a metre and a half deep.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Metre

Meter \Me"ter\, Metre \Me"tre\, n. [OE. metre, F. m[`e]tre, L. metrum, fr. Gr. ?; akin to Skr. m[=a] to measure. See Mete to measure.]

  1. Rhythmical arrangement of syllables or words into verses, stanzas, strophes, etc.; poetical measure, depending on number, quantity, and accent of syllables; rhythm; measure; verse; also, any specific rhythmical arrangements; as, the Horatian meters; a dactylic meter.

    The only strict antithesis to prose is meter.
    --Wordsworth.

  2. A poem. [Obs.]
    --Robynson (More's Utopia).

  3. A measure of length, equal to 39.37 English inches, the standard of linear measure in the metric system of weights and measures. It was intended to be, and is very nearly, the ten millionth part of the distance from the equator to the north pole, as ascertained by actual measurement of an arc of a meridian. See Metric system, under Metric.

    Common meter (Hymnol.), four iambic verses, or lines, making a stanza, the first and third having each four feet, and the second and fourth each three feet; -- usually indicated by the initials C. M.

    Long meter (Hymnol.), iambic verses or lines of four feet each, four verses usually making a stanza; -- commonly indicated by the initials L. M.

    Short meter (Hymnol.), iambic verses or lines, the first, second, and fourth having each three feet, and the third four feet. The stanza usually consists of four lines, but is sometimes doubled. Short meter is indicated by the initials S. M.

Metre

Metre \Me"tre\ (m[=e]"t[~e]r), n. See Meter.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
metre

chiefly British English spelling of meter (n.); for spelling, see -re.

Wiktionary
metre

Etymology 1 n. The basic unit of length in the International System of Units (SI: Système International d'Unités). It is equal to (frac 39 47 127) (approximately 39.37) imperial system inches. vb. (context British rare English) (alternative spelling of meter English) Etymology 2

n. The rhythm or measure in verse and musical composition. vb. (context poetry music English) To put into metrical form.

WordNet
metre
  1. n. the basic unit of length adopted under the Systeme International d'Unites (approximately 1.094 yards) [syn: meter, m]

  2. (prosody) the accent in a metrical foot of verse [syn: meter, measure, beat, cadence]

  3. rhythm as given by division into parts of equal time [syn: meter, time]

Wikipedia
Metre

The metre, or meter ( American spelling), (from the Greek noun μέτρον, "measure") is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). The SI unit symbol is m. The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a specific fraction of a second.

The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1889, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was subsequently changed twice). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. In 1983, the current definition was adopted.

The imperial inch is defined as 0.0254 metres (2.54 centimetres or 25.4 millimetres). One metre is about inches longer than a yard, i.e. about inches.

Metre (poetry)

In poetry, metre (meter in US spelling) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody. (Within linguistics, " prosody" is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetic metre but also the rhythmic aspects of prose, whether formal or informal, that vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)

Metre (hymn)

A hymn metre (Am. meter) indicates the number of syllables for the lines in each stanza of a hymn. This provides a means of marrying the hymn's text with an appropriate hymn tune for singing.

Metre (music)

The metre (Am. meter) of music is its rhythmic structure, the patterns of accents heard in regularly recurring measures of stressed and unstressed beats ( arsis and thesis) at the frequency of the music's pulse.

A variety of systems exist throughout the world for organising and playing metrical music, such as the Indian system of tala and similar systems in Arabian and African music.

Western music inherited the concept of metre from poetry (; ) where it denotes: the number of lines in a verse; the number of syllables in each line; and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented (; ). The first coherent system of rhythmic notation in modern Western music was based on rhythmic modes derived from the basic types of metrical unit in the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry .

Later music for dances such as the pavane and galliard consisted of musical phrases to accompany a fixed sequence of basic steps with a defined tempo and time signature. The English word "measure", originally an exact or just amount of time, came to denote either a poetic rhythm, a bar of music, or else an entire melodic verse or dance involving sequences of notes, words, or movements that may last four, eight or sixteen bars.

Usage examples of "metre".

There was simply not the time to cast it into rhyme or metre, to take care with assonance and ambiguity.

A hundred metres ahead lay the twentieth century, the autoroute junction raised on stilts, sloping down into its cloverleaf pattern that allowed the eye, intent upon its tight curve, no leisure for the driver to stare at the countryside.

Heron was walking on ahead of him, preceding him by some fifty metres or so, his long legs covering the distances more rapidly than de Batz could follow them.

I then descended as deeply in the water as I could, the manometer showing thirty metres.

Hanging a metre off the reservoir bed, motionless, trying to outstare a dolphin.

It has sometimes in the end of words a sound obscure, and scarcely perceptible, as open, shapen, shotten, thistle, participle, metre, lucre.

The photon amp showed a monster crab scuttling right at him, metre length of pipe instead of claw.

It can punch through half a metre of solid prestressed concrete without shattering until it hits something soft.

In panic, he had rushed for the kitchen area and had barely enough time to assume a disguise, secreted there, that Katsumata had given him as, a few metres away, masked by a hedge, the Sergeant shoved past the bowing doorman, kicked off his sandals and stomped onto the veranda of the main house.

A couple of metres from the path a gardener servitor was ambling round an old tree stump which was now hidden beneath the shaggy coat of a stephanotis creeper.

Now lit by many flares, it was revealed to be a narrow twisting chasm that stretched away into darkness for several hundred metres.

U-shaped beams that hung from the ceiling, and it stretched for about fifty metres before it stopped just short of a very large recess in the ceiling.

West and his team, stretching upward for maybe 100 metres, ending at the left-hand sentry tower.

If you suspect there may be a lot of rodents, set numerous traps all at once, every metre or so.

This is the eastern quarter, the oldest human settlement on Tropicana, where the palm-thatched bungalows cluster scant metres above the white sands of Almond Beach.