The prosody is, traditionally, the part of the grammar which treats quantity and accent. First of all held to the ancient languages, Greek and Latin, the term, as of the Renaissance, was applied, with the same significance, with the modern languages. The Prosodie of the abbot of Olivet (1736) a long time made authority concerning the rules of syllabic quantity in French.

The Linguistique redefined the prosody like the whole of the phenomena known as suprasegmental , i.e. escaping cutting from the connected speech in phonemes: approximately the accent, quantity and the intonation. On this ground, the prosody is complementary to Phonologie.

It is by abuse that one calls sometimes prosody the whole of the rules of construction of the Towards. It is the metric , and not the prosody, which treats structure of the worms: one should thus hold the term of prosody to the intrinsic properties of the Syllabes. If the metric one has a bond with the prosody, it is because it is likely to be based (but without including them) on prosodic properties. For example, the metric graeco-latin one is based on the quantity (prosodic) syllables. It does not hold on the other hand any account of the tonic Accent, which however belongs also to the prosody. On this ground, the prosody and the metric one are thus distinct but complementary, even if it is not always easy to delimit their respective fields very precisely.

In vocal Music, one calls also prosody the way in which are put in measurement and rate/rhythm the syllables of the text. In France, for example, until worms the third quarter of the 16th century, the musical rate/rhythm was especially copied on the poetic Mètre, without seeking to privilege other syllables that those of the Césure and Rime. With the measured music launched in the years 1570 by the Academy of music and poetry, one attends an attempt at scale to return in music the syllabic quantity. One century later, the Récitatif will rather stick to highlight the tonic accents of the text, practical which will remain the standard.

; Prosody and metric: Confusion between prosody and metric finds its roots in the study of the ancient languages. As the metric graeco-latin one is based on the syllabic quantity, which is in theory a prosodic property, the two disciplines in concert were always studied. Moreover, like the texts in prose, in their written form, gives only fragmentary information on the prosody, one always made use of the texts métrifiés to reconstitute the prosodic quantity of the Greek and the Latin . This intimate link between the two disciplines is not established to facilitate their delimitation.