What Is Tmesis?
Quick answer: Tmesis is the splitting of a word so another word sits inside it, as in abso-blooming-lutely. Learn how tmesis works in poetry, drama and everyday speech.
Tmesis is the rhetorical figure of cutting a word, compound or set phrase in two and inserting another word between the halves. English speakers perform it constantly without knowing its name: abso-blooming-lutely, fan-flipping-tastic, any-old-how. The word comes from the Greek temnein, to cut, so tmesis literally means a cutting, and that is exactly what it does: it takes a verbal unit the language treats as sealed and opens it up with a knife.
The figure sounds like a novelty act, and in the pub it usually is, but its pedigree is long and serious. Homer's Greek routinely separates the two halves of compound verbs; Roman poets played the game so hard that grammarians told jokes about it; Shakespeare split words for emphasis; and Gerard Manley Hopkins carried tmesis across a line break in one of the most famous openings in English poetry. Understanding tmesis means understanding something bigger: that word boundaries are conventions, and poets have always enjoyed showing the seams.
A word, cut open
The strict definition is simple: tmesis inserts one or more words into the middle of another word or of a fixed phrase. The host can be a single word, as when unbelievable becomes un-be-lievable with a jab of stress in the middle; a compound, as when whatsoever becomes what things soever; or a phrase so fossilised it behaves like a word, as in the old construction to us-ward, where the word toward has been prised apart around a pronoun.
What makes it tmesis rather than ordinary word order is the violence to a sealed unit. English does not normally allow anything inside a word, which is why the effect is instantly audible. The listener feels the cut, registers the intruder, and reassembles the host, all in a fraction of a second, and that tiny jolt of processing is the figure's whole payload: emphasis, comedy, or a flash of strangeness, depending on what the writer smuggles into the gap.
The oldest cuts: Homer and Ennius
In Homeric Greek, prefixes that later fused onto verbs still floated free, so a phrase meaning roughly he took away could appear with the preposition several words distant from its verb. Classical grammarians, reading Homer with fused compounds already standard in their own Greek, saw these separations as a poetic figure and named it tmesis. Linguists now note that Homer's usage may simply preserve older grammar rather than break newer grammar, which is a tidy reminder that one era's ordinary syntax is another era's special effect.
Latin poets took the figure up deliberately. The showpiece example, attributed to the early Roman poet Ennius, splits cerebrum, the word for brain, around a verb: saxo cere comminuit brum, roughly he shattered his cere, with a rock, brum. The word for brain is broken exactly as the skull is. Scholars suspect the line may be a grammarians' parody rather than genuine Ennius, but either way it demonstrates the figure's expressive logic perfectly: form enacting sense, the sentence performing the injury it reports.
Tmesis in English poets and playwrights
English literary tmesis tends to work on compounds and fossil phrases, where the seams are still faintly visible. The King James tradition gives constructions like to us-ward and to God-ward. Shakespeare splits howsoever and whatsoever for rhythm and weight, as in Richard II, where 'how heinous e'er it be' opens up howe'er to let the crime sit inside the concession. The Elizabethans, trained on Latin rhetoric, knew exactly what they were doing and had the Greek name for it.
The most celebrated modern instance is Gerard Manley Hopkins, who begins The Windhover, written in 1877 and published in 1918, by breaking the word kingdom across a line: 'I caught this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin'. The cut is audacious: the line ends on king, so the falcon is crowned for a heartbeat before the sentence continues, and the enjambment doubles as tmesis because the line break itself is the intruder in the word. E. E. Cummings pushed word-splitting further still in the decades after, scattering syllables down the page, though his games usually abandon the reassembled host that classic tmesis relies on.
The pub version: expletive infixation
Everyday English owns one thriving species of tmesis: dropping an intensifier into the middle of a word, as in abso-blooming-lutely or un-be-lievable. Linguists call it expletive infixation, and its most delightful property is that it obeys a strict rule no one is ever taught. The inserted word must land immediately before the syllable carrying primary stress: fan-TAS-tic yields fan-flipping-TAStic, and kangaroo yields kanga-blooming-roo. Try the insertion anywhere else, say ab-flipping-solutely, and every native speaker's ear rejects it instantly.
That hidden rule is worth a poet's attention for two reasons. First, it proves that ordinary speakers carry precise metrical knowledge they cannot articulate, which is the same knowledge scansion tries to make conscious. Second, it shows that even the rudest tmesis is a stress-placement device at heart: the cut exists to hang extra weight just before the loudest syllable. Poetic tmesis, from Ennius to Hopkins, exploits exactly the same mechanics with different cargo.
Tmesis, enjambment, infix: close cousins, different tools
Three lookalikes are worth separating. Enjambment breaks a sentence across a line ending, but each word stays whole; tmesis breaks a word or fixed phrase, whatever the lines are doing. Hopkins' king-dom is the rare case that is both at once, a word broken by a line break, which is why it startles twice. An infix, meanwhile, is a grammatical morpheme a language inserts into words as part of its ordinary machinery, common in Tagalog and other languages; English has no true grammatical infixes, so when English speakers insert whole words for emphasis, it counts as tmesis rather than inflection.
There is also a boundary with simple interruption. Dashes and parentheses drop material between words, not inside them, so a mid-sentence aside is not tmesis however disruptive it feels. The test is always the same: was a sealed verbal unit opened? If the intruder sits between two words, you have parenthesis or hyperbaton. If it sits inside one, you have a cutting.
Using tmesis in your own poems
Tmesis is a strong spice, so the first rule is scarcity: one cut in a poem is an event, three is a mannerism. The second rule is placement with purpose. Use it for comic voice, where the intrusion mimics speech under pressure; for emphasis, hanging weight before a stressed syllable exactly as the pub version does; or for enactment, letting a broken word perform a broken thing, the Ennius trick.
A quick original example of the third use: 'The divorce went through in June; / our little king- / and their little -dom / now live a county apart.' The severed word does the emotional work no adjective could. Try the same move with any word whose halves can stand alone, wall-paper, break-fast, some-where, and see what meaning leaks out of the gap. Handled with restraint, tmesis reminds readers that words are made things, and that a poet is someone with the toolkit open.
What poets can take from this
- Use tmesis at most once per poem; the figure's power is proportional to its rarity.
- When inserting a word for emphasis, place it immediately before the syllable with primary stress, as native instinct demands.
- Choose host words whose halves carry meaning on their own, so the cut releases something.
- Consider breaking the word across a line ending, Hopkins-style, so the first half stands exposed for a beat.
- Let the cut enact the sense: split a word about breaking, distance or division at its seam.
- Read the result aloud; if a listener cannot reassemble the host word instantly, the figure has failed.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about something splitting apart, a marriage, a country, an iceberg, in which exactly one key word is cut in two by tmesis at the poem's turning point, and the two halves land in different lines.
Questions
Is abso-bloody-lutely really tmesis?
Yes, it is the textbook modern example. Linguists file it under expletive infixation, a subtype of tmesis in which an intensifier is inserted into a word, always immediately before the stressed syllable. The mechanism, opening a sealed word to admit an intruder, is the same one Roman poets used.
How do you pronounce tmesis?
Commonly TMEE-sis or, more comfortably for English mouths, muh-NEE-sis with the initial t softened or dropped, since English words do not begin with the tm cluster. Dictionaries accept both. The plural is tmeses.
What is the difference between tmesis and enjambment?
Enjambment runs a sentence past a line ending while leaving every word intact; tmesis splits a word or fixed phrase and inserts something into it. The two can coincide, as in Hopkins' The Windhover, where the word kingdom is broken across the line break itself.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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