That would be a rhopalic verse (only one 'l') Of text in which each word contains one more letter or syllable than the one preceding it. This word derives from the Greek rhopalos, for a club or
cudgel which, like most of its kind, is thicker towards one end than
the other. Though the English word is first recorded only at the end of
the seventeenth century, the technique is almost certainly much older.
It is commonly applied to poetry whose words advance each time by one
syllable, or sometimes one foot, but it can also apply to prose. The
classic example of the latter form was created by Dmitri Borgmann: “ I
which manages the difficult feat of reaching a word of twenty letters. (David Crystal, who quotes this in his book Language Play, remarks: “It would be ultraconscientiousness to go further”. Even overintellectualisation, perhaps.) In poetry, such wordplay has also been described as snowball verse and wedge verse. Rod Stasick wrote:
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- FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc. - is there a me... Allan Revich
- RE: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc. - is t... Allan Revich
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc. - ... Rod Stasick
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc... Cecil Touchon
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic... Rod Stasick
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc... Rod Stasick
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc. - ... mIEKAL aND
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc... Halvard Johnson
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc... mIEKAL aND
- RE: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic... Allan Revich
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc. - is t... Rod Stasick
- RE: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc. - ... Allan Revich
- Re: FLUXLIST: mesostic/acrostic/exhaustic etc... Rod Stasick