cheville

plural chevilles

1. communicationsA word or phrase whose only function is to make a sentence metrically balanced.

   The practice of using chevilles was very common in old Irish poetry, and a bad practice it was; for many a good poem is quite spoiled by the constant and wearisome recurrence of these chevilles.

   1910, Patrick Weston Joyce, English as we speak it in Ireland, chapter 5

   1 more example

   The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.

   1905, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Art of Writing