Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adverb & adjective At an octave higher or lower than the notes written. Used chiefly as a direction, positioned above or below a staff.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An octave.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adverb music One octave higher. Marking indicates a passage to be transposed up one octave. Abbreviation:
8va .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Christopher Serra The poem -- modest in length, if not in scope -- comprises eight stanzas of eight lines each and employs a rhyme scheme, abababcc, known as ottava rima.
A Late Bloom From a Master Jim Zinsmeister 2009
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Slavitt calls the ottava rima stanza of Ariosto “inherently humorous,” but he seldom uses it in its pure form, opting instead for a loosey-goosey meter that sometimes succeeds in conveying Ariosto’s conversational moments but utterly fails to capture his lyrical side.
The OLM Blog 2009
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Slavitt calls the ottava rima stanza of Ariosto “inherently humorous,” but he seldom uses it in its pure form, opting instead for a loosey-goosey meter that sometimes succeeds in conveying Ariosto’s conversational moments but utterly fails to capture his lyrical side.
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Yesterday evening I wrote and fairly copied out six ottava rima stanzas (48 lines) viz: — "The Cormorant and the Fishes, imitated from La Fontaine, and dedicated to the Conservatives."
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His poetic tastes – a quatrain and a canzone stanza of Petrarch, an ottava by Ariosto, a Sannazaro poem and a pastoral in sestina a form he particularly liked – are typical of the period.
Archive 2009-06-01 Lu 2009
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G. C. Croce, Alfabeto de giuocatori in ottava rima: Opera morale, Bologna, 1611.
Delizia! John Dickie 2008
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Yet when Lord Byron speculated that the mind of John Keats, “that fiery particle,” might have been “snuffed out by an article” of poetry criticism, he made his comment in the best-selling ottava rima mock-epic known as Don Juan.
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Yet when Lord Byron speculated that the mind of John Keats, “that fiery particle,” might have been “snuffed out by an article” of poetry criticism, he made his comment in the best-selling ottava rima mock-epic known as Don Juan.
Ulysses Gets Panned 2004
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Yet when Lord Byron speculated that the mind of John Keats, “that fiery particle,” might have been “snuffed out by an article” of poetry criticism, he made his comment in the best-selling ottava rima mock-epic known as Don Juan.
Mining Our History 2004
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Yet when Lord Byron speculated that the mind of John Keats, “that fiery particle,” might have been “snuffed out by an article” of poetry criticism, he made his comment in the best-selling ottava rima mock-epic known as Don Juan.
The Problem of Humor 2004
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