Top 20 Figures of Speech – Flashcards
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Alliteration
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The repetition of an initial consonant sound.
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Anaphora
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The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses. (Contrast with epiphora and epistrophe.)
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Antithesis
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The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
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Chiasmus
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A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed.
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Euphemism
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The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.
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Hyperbole
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An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
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Irony
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The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. A statement or situation where the meaning is contradicted by the appearance or presentation of the idea.
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Litotes
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A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.
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Metaphor
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An implied comparison between two unlike things that actually have something important in common.
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Metonymy
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A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated; also, the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it.
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Onomatopoeia
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The use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
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Oxymoron
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A figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side.
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Paradox
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A statement that appears to contradict itself.
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Personification
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A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities.
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Pun
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A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
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Simile
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A stated comparison (usually formed with "like" or "as") between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common.
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Synecdoche
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A figure of speech in which a part is used to represent the whole (for example, ABCs for alphabet) or the whole for a part ("England won the World Cup in 1966").
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Understatement
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A figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.
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Apostrophe
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Breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character.
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Assonance
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Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
