Octosyllable

The octosyllable or octosyllabic verse is a

stress accent. Its first occurrence is in a 10th-century Old French saint's legend, the Vie de Saint Leger;^[1] another early use is in the early 12th-century Anglo-Norman Voyage de saint Brendan.^[2] It is often used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry. While commonly used in couplets, typical stanzas using octosyllables are: décima, some quatrains, redondilla

.

In Spanish verse, an octosyllable is a line that has its seventh syllable stressed, on the principle that this would normally be the penultimate syllable of a word (Lengua Castellana y Literatura, ed. Grazalema Santillana. El Verso y su Medida, p. 46). If the final word of a line does not fit this pattern, the line could have eight or seven or nine syllables (as normally counted), thus –

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / Gra/NA/da

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / Ma/DRID

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / MA/(la)/ga

In

Chaucer).^[1]