prose

Spoken or written language without regular metre; in literature, prose corresponds more closely to the patterns of everyday speech than poetry, and often uses standard grammar and syntax and traditional rhetoric to achieve its ends.

In Western literature prose was traditionally used for what is today called non-fiction – that is, history, biography, essays, and so on – while verse was used for imaginative literature. Prose came into its own as a vehicle for fiction with the rise of the novel in the 18th century. In modern literature, the distinction between poetry and prose is not always clear.

In the USA the genre of the short story has further complicated the differences between prose and poetry, since short stories are also highly imaginative, and may even borrow techniques from poetry to achieve more emotive effects.

prose

In music, another name, chiefly French, for the sequence (in the medieval sense of an ornamental interpolation into the music of the Mass). After the 9th century, words began to be added to the sequences, and this is the reason for them being called proses, since the texts were not originally in verse.