literary terms

1.  Allusion – reference to a well-known person, place, event, or book. Common Shakespearean allusions involve the Bible and mythology

2. Pun – a play on words; using different meanings of the same word (“Teachers have class.”)

3. Hyperbole – exaggeration for dramatic effect (“It’s a thousand degrees”)             

4. Alliteration – repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of words (“the silence surged softly…”)

5. Simile- a comparison between 2 unlike things using “like” or “as”

6. Metaphor- a comparison between 2 unlike things

8. Onomatopoeia – words that imitate sounds (sizzle, thud, clang, roar)

9. Oxymoron - a figure of speech that combines two contradictory words placed next to each other (walking dead, jumbo shrimp)

10. Personification - a non-living thing has the characteristics of a person (“the moon’s face”)

11. Dramatic Irony- when the audience knows what’s going on but the characters do not

12. Idiom - a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g., rain cats and dogs, see the light ); an expression

13. Stanza -a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a verse.

14. Imagery- visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.