Four lines of verse form a stanza. Some poets include more in a sequence of stanzas called an "ode." Poetry forms are not limited to four-line verses but can be any length. A poem can have as few as three lines or as many as hundreds. The term "stanza" comes from the Italian word for "stand," because medieval poems were often printed in separate books called stanzas. Today, these pieces are usually called poems, but this term is also used to describe larger compositions that are divided into several sections. The English language has no fixed number of syllables or words per line.