# matra

> English word · Noun

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

## Etymology
Borrowed from Sanskrit मात्रा (mātrā, “measure, small quantity”).

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/matra