Stanza is first recorded in English at the end of the 16th century, borrowed from Italian. A stanza is a well-defined group of several lines of poetry having a fixed length, meter, or rhyme scheme; the scheme is usually repeated. In Italian, stanza means “a stopping place, room (in a house), lodging, chamber, stanza (in poetry).” The Italian word comes from Vulgar Latin stantia, a noun formed from stant-, the present participle stem of stare “to stand” and the abstract noun suffix -ia.
Stanza and strophe are often used interchangeably, but stanza is more properly used for modern rhyming poetry based on stressed versus unstressed syllables, and strophe is more properly used for ancient quantitative poetry based on the duration of syllables, especially in Greek drama. In modern poetry, a strophe is any separate section or extended movement in a poem, distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated scheme.

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