[f. prec. + -ER1.] a. A poem of fourteen lines. rare–1. b. A line of fourteen syllables. Also attrib.
1829. Lamb, Lett. to Procter, xvii. 157. Study that sonnet…. And was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual?
1884. Saintsbury, Ess. Eng. Lit. (1891), 350. Few men, again, manage the long ‘fourteener’ with middle rhyme better than Lockhart. Ibid. (1887), Hist. Elizab. Lit., i. 9. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently almost indigenous ‘eights and sixes’ into fourteener lines and into alternate fourteeners and Alexandrines seems to have commended itself even more to contemporary taste.
