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Meter is a metric measurement slightly longer than a yard; thus, a 100-meter dash might take you a second longer than a 100-yard dash. But the word has a different sense in music, where people aren't separated by whether they use the metric system. For a musician, the meter is the regular background rhythm, expressed by the "time signature" written at the beginning of a piece or section: 2/2, 2/4, 3/8, 4/4, 6/8, etc. Within a meter, you can create rhythms that range from the simple to the complex. So, for example, "America the Beautiful" is in 4/4 meter (or "4/4 time"), but so are most of the rhythmically complex songs written by Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, or Stevie Wonder. In ordinary conversation, though, most people use "rhythm" to include meter and everything that's built on top of it. In poetry, meter has much the same meaning; however, poetic meters aren't named with numbers but instead with traditional Greek and Latin terms such as iambic and dactylic.
Synonyms
Examples of meter in a Sentence
The Editors, National Review, 22 Apr. 2024
The water is supplied through two meter points and is then distributed to locations in the city through a maze of underground transmission and distribution mains and three reservoirs.
—Adrienne Davis, Journal Sentinel, 18 Apr. 2024
The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters, and such sediments are full of distinctive markers, like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species.
—Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Apr. 2024
What’s important about this attack is that, two meters from Leonid’s home, some people were waiting for him with a hammer and a can of pepper spray.
—TIME, 17 Apr. 2024
Until now, the limit had been set to 100 micrograms of silica per cubic meter of air, double the new amount.
—Annalisa Merelli, STAT, 16 Apr. 2024
His latest record of 6.23 meters, achieved at last year’s world championships, is seven centimeters higher than anyone else has managed in the history of the sport, a testament to his supremacy in the pole vault over the past four years.
—George Ramsay, CNN, 11 Apr. 2024
Between 50 and 300 meters (m) in depth, the Bisbee is underlain by approximately two kms thick of the same Paleozoic carbonate formations that host the 110 MT Hermosa-Taylor zinc-lead-silver deposit of South32 located 60 km southwest of Tombstone.
—Kansas City Star, 10 Apr. 2024
During a training exercise in southern Ukraine in May 2023, a drone pilot maneuvered a flier to a height of 100 meters before dropping a dummy anti-tank grenade on to a pile of tires.
—IEEE Spectrum, 10 Apr. 2024
Sarah Scott, Parents, 20 Feb. 2024
Around downtown San Jose, there are a number of areas with marked and often metered parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk.
—John Woolfolk, The Mercury News, 6 Feb. 2024
This kind of tracking and analytics of police officers’ exact movements could allow the app to do something other predictive policing tools have not: meter out where patrol assignments occur to reduce instances of over-policing.
—WIRED, 27 Sep. 2023
As a consequence, the lawsuit alleges, the DWP underestimated outdoor water use, overcharging customers whose outdoor use wasn’t metered separately.
—Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times, 9 Aug. 2023
In May the regulatory body issued its first power consumption notice, asking Texas residents to meter their energy usage and avoid using large machinery such as washing machines during prime windows over the course of a particularly hot weekend.
—Dan Carson, Chron, 8 June 2022
All taxis are metered at set rates established by the government.
—Skye Sherman, Travel + Leisure, 7 Apr. 2023
Free parking is available in the Tower 155 Garage and metered parking on the street.
—Phillip Valys, Sun Sentinel, 31 Mar. 2023
According to its website, the water utility directly serves 125,000 residential, commercial, industrial, and master-metered customers in Pulaski, Saline and Grant counties.
—Daniel McFadin, Arkansas Online, 12 Mar. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'meter.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near meter
Cite this Entry
“Meter.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meter. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.
Copy CitationKids Definition
meter
1 of 3 noun
meter
2 of 3 nounmeter
3 of 3 nounMedical Definition
meter
1 of 2 nounmeter
2 of 2 noun
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