rúmmetrum

Rúmmetrum is a term used in contemporary poetics to denote a quantitative measure of rhythmic space in a line of verse. It is a heuristic rather than a traditional meter, designed for computational analysis and cross-disciplinary study of poetic rhythm.

Etymology and concept: The word is a compound formed from elements meaning space or room and meter. It is used to describe how much of a line's rhythm is determined by fixed spacing of beats versus irregular deviations.

Definition and calculation: Rúmmetrum assigns a score R to a line by analyzing syllable onsets and stresses against a chosen metrical template. The process involves scanning the line, mapping syllables to a regular grid of beats, recording deviations, and normalizing the measure to a 0–1 scale, where 1 indicates a highly regular pattern and 0 indicates maximal irregularity such as free verse.

Example: A strict iambic line may yield R near 0.9, while a line with variable tempo and elision yields a lower value; a free-verse line may approach 0.2 or lower depending on the method.

Applications and limitations: It is used in digital humanities, performance studies, and stylometry to compare rhythmic design across poets, languages, and genres. Limitations include dependence on the chosen template, language prosody differences, and the general abstraction from performance.

See also: meter, rhythm, prosody, quantitative poetics.