matra

Meaning

Noun

• In Indian music, the smallest rhythmic unit of a tala.
• In Indian poetics and linguistics, a measure of the length of a syllable; equivalent to mora.
• The characteristic horizontal line drawn above characters in some Indic scripts.
• An intra-syllabic vowel symbol in Indic scripts.

Origin

• Borrowed from Sanskrit मात्रा ("measure, small quantity")