Figures of speech

Alliteration

Repetition of a letter or sounds, usually at the beginning of words.
Example: "She wore sixty shimmering shells under her shawl."

Allusion

A reference to a famous person or event in life or literature.
Example: "Was the ticking package, gaily wrapped with ribbon and bright paper, a Trojan gift?"

Anachronism

To bring together things which clearly stem from entirely different times.
Example: "Jesus phoned his mother to tell her he would be late from work."

Analogy

A longer, more detailed comparison of two ideas or situations.
Example: "Some people live their lives like a sheet of scrapped paper blown along a windy street; they are carried this way and that with no apparent effort or ability to control their direction."

Anaphora

A scheme in which the same word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences.
Example: "I will fight for you. I will fight to save Social Security. I will fight to raise the minimum wage."

Anastrophe

A scheme in which normal word order is changed for emphasis.
Example: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Antithesis

A contrast of ideas or words by means of parallel arrangement of words, clauses, or sentences.
Example: "Let us have action, not words."

Apostrophe

Addressing an abstraction, an inanimate object, or something that is not actually present.
Example: "Wind, be silent!"

Cliché

A hackneyed expression.
Example: "Laughter is the best medicine."

Climax and Anti-Climax

A series of incidents of increasing magnitude, often ending in a culminating incident.
Example (Climax): "The soldiers, clutching their weapons, raced across the beaches, then scaled the cliffs, and met the enemy, face to face."
Example (Anti-Climax): "He woke up, turned off the alarm clock, stretched, yawned, and went right back to sleep."

Ellipsis

A grammatically incomplete expression that requires the reader to add concepts in order to finish the thought.
Example: "To be, or not to be: that is the question."

Epistrophe

A scheme in which the same word is repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences.
Example: "We are born to love, we live to love, and we will die to love."

Euphemism

The substitution of a cultured or less offensive term for a harsh one.
Example: "You won't find him here. He's pushing up daisies as we speak."

Hyperbole

Intentional exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis, or a magnifying beyond reality.
Example: "This book weighs a tonne!"

Imagery

The use of language to create sensory impressions in the mind of the listener or reader, painting the picture of a specific moment or scene.
Example: "His world came crashing down on him when he heard the bad news."

Irony

An idea that expresses something other than its literal meaning.
Example: "Of course I believe the President! It's such a good idea to completely believe anything politicians say."

Litotes

A deliberate understatement achieved by expressing the negation of its opposite.
Example: "Hitler was not an angel."

Metaphor

Compares two things by saying one thing is another thing.
Example: "The snow was a soft blanket, completely covering the frozen earth."

Metonymy

A word that makes reference to someone or something by naming or describing one of its attributes.
Example: "The kettle is boiling."

Neologism

A new word (or expression).
Example: "How do you like apartmenting in the city?"

Onomatopoeia

Words which suggest the sound of what they are describing.
Example: "The ducks were quacking and the bees were buzzing."

Oxymoron

A trope that connects two contradictory terms.
Example: "Your answers are perfectly wrong."

Paradox

An apparent contradiction that may have some truth in it.
Example: "She felt hot and cold at the same time when she saw him."

Parallelism

A scheme consisting of recurrent syntactical similarities, used for rhetorical effect.
Example: "A pilot's business is with the wind, with the stars, with the night, with the sand, with the sea."

Personification

A trope in which human qualities or abilities are assigned to abstractions or inanimate objects.
Example: "The sun smiled down on the village."

Pun

A play on words that are either identical in sound or similar in sound, but are sharpl

Rhetorical Question

A scheme which presents a leading question, one that doesn't need an answer.
Example: "With all the violence on TV today, is it any wonder kids bring guns to school?"

Sarcasm

Sneering, jesting, or mocking a person, situation, or thing.
Example: "Really, Sherlock? Tell me something I don't know."

Simile

Compares two things, using the words 'like', 'as', 'as if', 'as though', 'as ... as'.
Example: "Her eyes were like two blue jewels."

Synecdoche

The concept that a part designates the whole thing (pars pro toto) and vice versa (toto pro pars).
Example: "The ship was manned by seventy hands."

Synaesthesia

The perception or description of one kind of sense impression in words normally used to describe a different sense.
Example: "A sweet voice."

Understatement

An expression of lesser strength than what the speaker or writer actually means or than what is normally expected.
Example: "It's just a scratch," he said, looking at the deep gash.

Zeugma

A trope in which one verb governs several words, or clauses, each in a different sense.
Example: "He stiffened his drink and his spine."

Periphrasis

A trope in which one substitutes a descriptive word or phrase for a proper noun.
Example: "The big man upstairs hears all your prayers."