When we study the earliest Sanskrit poetry, we see that it was composed of words which had a fixed measure, each word containing three consonant root-letters to which different vowels were attached. This divided them into two kinds: words of one syllable and words of two syllables. For instance, to the consonant root mtr could be attached one vowel a, giving matr, mother; or two vowels i and a, giving rnitra, friend. The arrangement of the words thus composed formed a meter, and there were a great number of these meters in use.