: Re: Using elision in poetry I am seriously wondering what the limits are concerning the use of elision. It seems from the definition that elision is the omission of one vowel, consonant or syllable:

There are lots of elisions which are possible in speech, and which you could easily indicate by an apostrophe so as to specify the exact pronunciation in poetry:

mis'ry, comf'table, murd'rous extr'ordin'ry, and maybe us'ly.

Alternatively, you could indicate these pronunciations with spelling:

misry, comfterble, murdrous, extrordinry, uzhly.

Or, if your poetry has a strong meter, you could just trust your readers to realize that they need to drop some syllables to make it scan.

Personally, I think the apostrophes look better than misspelling the words.

But one comment: Do people actually say apostr'phe? I wouldn't know how to pronounce the sequence of consonants /strf/ in the middle of the word. I can pronounce aposterphe, but that has the same number of syllables as apostrophe, so unless you were trying to make it rhyme with Gloucester fee I don't see why you would want to specify that (not uncommon) mispronunciation.

If you want people to actually read your poetry out loud, I would recommend only using elisions where the resulting word is pronounceable.

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