Word list · 15 words
Figures of speech
A figure of speech is a deliberate departure from plain wording, used to make a point land harder, sound better or mean two things at once. Classical rhetoric named a great many; this list keeps the ones you will actually meet in speeches, novels, adverts and arguments.
They are listed A to Z. Several come in pairs that are easy to confuse, such as metonymy and synecdoche or irony and sarcasm, and the entries for those say where the line falls.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Anaphora
Repeating the same words at the start of successive clauses — we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight.
Literary & Rhetorical
Apophasis
Saying something by declaring that you will not say it — I won't mention his convictions, I'm not going to bring up what happened last year.
Literary & Rhetorical
Aposiopesis
Breaking off mid-sentence and leaving it unfinished — why, I ought to—
Literary & Rhetorical
Chiasmus
A structure that reverses itself — the second half mirrors the first in inverted order, ABBA.
Literary & Rhetorical
Irony
A gap between what is said or expected and what is meant or happens — split into verbal, dramatic and situational, which locate the gap in three different places.
Head Words
Litotes
Understatement by denying the opposite — not bad, no small feat, not unlike, hardly a disaster.
Literary & Rhetorical
Metonymy
Calling a thing by the name of something closely associated with it — the crown, the White House, the press, the bottle.
Literary & Rhetorical
Oxymoron
An oxymoron is a figure of speech that jams two opposite words together on purpose — "deafening silence," "bittersweet," "jumbo shrimp." The contradiction isn't a mistake; it's the effect — though…
Grammar & Commonly-Confused
Sarcasm
Saying the opposite of what you mean, aimed at a person, with intent to wound.
Literary & Rhetorical
Synecdoche
Naming a thing by one of its parts, or a part by the whole — all hands on deck, wheels for a car, boots on the ground.
Literary & Rhetorical
Tmesis
Splitting a word in half and inserting something in the middle — abso-bloody-lutely, un-freaking-believable.
Literary & Rhetorical
Zeugma
One word yoked to two others that it governs in two different ways — she took her coat and her leave.
Literary & Rhetorical