What is the term for a pair of consecutive rhyming lines in poetry? The term is couplet. A couplet consists of two successive lines, traditionally sharing a rhyme and often the same meter.
Couplets can be “closed,” meaning each line is grammatically complete and end-stopped, or “open” and run-on, meaning the sentence continues across the line break. They can appear as independent poems, at the end of a stanza, or throughout a longer work. The heroic couplet, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter, became especially important in English poetry through writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope.
The word comes from French and originally referred to two pieces joined together. A common mix-up is confusing a couplet with a quatrain, which has four lines, or with an octave and sestet, which contain eight and six lines respectively. Although rhyme is traditional, modern poetry can also use unrhymed couplets.