Syncope  (pronounced "sink-oh-pee") is the omission (in the implied reading) of a vowel in the middle of a word in order to accommodate the word to the meter. (This differs from synaeresis, where two vowels are slurred together.) In English poetry of the eighteenth century, syncope was a self-conscious and artificial practice that gave the effect of a pleasurable submission to the established meter, most often to a strict 10-syllable line. The word "muttering," for example, tends to be pronounced with three syllables, but is easily reduced to "mutt-ring." Where the pronunciation was considered to be more definite, the author (or printer) often used apostrophes ("us'd") to make sure that no archaic or illiterate speech intruded, but it was left to the sophisticated reader to supply the syncopes. Some examples from Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard  appear below:

                                Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
                                  And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
                                Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
                                  And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

                                Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
                                  The moping owl does to the moon complain
                                Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
                                  Molest her ancient solitary reign.

                                Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
                                  Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
                                Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
                                  The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

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