hendecasyllable

The hendecasyllable is a line of verse containing eleven syllables. The name derives from the Greek hendeka, meaning eleven, combined with syllable. In literary usage the form is most closely associated with Italian and Spanish prosody, where the eleven-syllable line is a standard building block of classical poetry. In Italian it is known as endecasillabo; in Spanish it is endecasílabo.

In Italian poetry, the endecasillabo became the dominant metrical line from the medieval period onward. It underpins much of the language’s classical verse, including Dante’s terza rima and Petrarch’s sonnets. The line is valued for its melodic flexibility and its capacity to support varied rhyme schemes, while allowing a cadence that often emphasizes a late-line stress or musical turn toward the end of the verse. Poets from Ariosto to Leopardi continued to work within the endecasillabo tradition, adapting it to different rhetorical and thematic aims.

The endecasílabo is also central to the Spanish literary tradition, where the eleven-syllable line has long served as a primary metric for Renaissance, Golden Age, and modern verse. In Spanish, as in Italian, syllable counting can be affected by elision, hiatus, and other phonetic phenomena, which poets negotiate to preserve the line’s eleven-syllable structure while maintaining rhythmic variety.

See also: endecasílabo, Spanish verse, Italian poetry.