Definitions for "Stichometry"
Measurement of books by the number of lines which they contain.
Division of the text of a book into lines; especially, the division of the text of books into lines accommodated to the sense, -- a method of writing manuscripts used before punctuation was adopted.
Scribes sometimes placed a letter of the Ionic alphabet in the left intercolumn after every 100 stichoi, by way of a running total. For verse texts, the count equals the number of lines; for prose texts, the stichos signifies a unit roughly equivalent to the length of a hexameter line, usually calculated at 15 or 16 syllables in length. The classic study of stichometric signs and their significance is Ohly 1928; see Obbink 1996, 62 n. 1 for more recent work.