AP LIT VOCAB DEVICES

Symbol

Any image or thing that stands for something else. Symbols are used frequently in literature but also in poems.

Allusion

A brief and direct reference to a person, place, thing or idea of historical, cultural, literary, or political significance.

Inversion

A technique in which the normal order of words is reversed. This is often done to maintain a particular rhyme scheme or meter.

Denotation

The dictionary definition of a word.

Connotation

Refers to all associated or implied meanings of a word.

Pun

A play on words, where an author employs a word that has a second meaning or that sounds to a similar word.

Tone

Refers to the emotional meaning behind lines of poetry.

Imagery

The representation through language of sense experience.

Closed Form Poetry

Fits into a previously established form.

Open Form Poetry

Does not abide to any specific rule.

Juxtaposition

Two or more contrasting words / phrases next to each other.

Enjambment

A line does not stop at the end of the line and continues to the next line without punctuation.

Caesura

Refers to a pause within a line or verse.

Onomatopoeia

Use of words that sound what they mean.

Anaphora

A type of refrain device, where the first word or phrase is repeated in a series of lines.

Repetition

A literary device that repeats the same words or phrases several times to make an idea.

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds.

Alliteration

The repetition of initial consonant sounds.

Consonance

The repetition of final consonant sounds.

Simile

A comparison made between two things that uses the helping words “like”, “as”, “than”, or “resembles”.

Metaphor

A comparison between two things that does NOT use any helping words.

Conceit

An extended metaphor with complex logic, a startling comparison, that governs a poetic passage or entire poem.

Personification

A special kind of metaphor that gives human attributes to a nonhuman object, concept, or animal.

Apostrophe

When a poem's speaker addresses someone absent, nonhuman, or dead.

Synedoche

The use of the part for the whole.

Metonymy

The use of something closely related for the thing actually meant.

Paradox

An apparent contradiction that is nevertheless somehow true.

Hyperbole

An overstatement or extravagant exaggeration, so far exaggerated that it cannot be taken literally.

Understatement

A poem says less than it means. It can sometimes co-exist with verbal irony.

Sarcasm

Bitter or cunning speech to hurt someone's feelings.

Satire

Literature that criticizes human folly.

Verbal Irony

Say opposite of what you mean to build figurative language.

Dramatic Irony

Knows something the character does not.

Situational Irony

Difference between what is predicted and what happens.