Proparoxytonos

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. Describing a word whose stress falls on the third syllable from the end, such as the Greek-derived term for such words themselves
2. Referring to a term stressed on its antepenultimate syllable, a pattern typical of certain Greek-derived words in English
3. Characterizing a word that carries its main stress on the syllable before the last two, marked in dictionaries with an acute accent

Etymology: Proparoxytonos is a grammatical term from ancient Greek scholarship, and its surprising fact is that it was a coinage of the Alexandrian grammarians, not a word ancient speakers used in everyday life. It combines "pro-" (before, forward) with "paroxytonos," the name for a word stressed on the second-to-last syllable, and "paroxytonos" itself is built from "para-" (beside) and "oxytonos" (sharp-toned, stressed on the last syllable). The logic is spatial: a paroxytone is stressed "beside" the final syllable, and a proparoxytone is stressed one step further back, "before" that position. The term describes a word stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, the third from the end, as in English "rhinoceros" or Greek "anthropos." Greek grammarians cared about these accents because Greek used pitch accent marked in writing, and the rules about where an accent could fall depended on the length of the final syllable. Because the term is a technical coinage, its use in English dates from the scholarly tradition of classical grammar rather than from any ordinary speech.