| A | B |
|---|
| allegory | A narrative in which abstract ideas figure as circumstances or persons, usually to enforce a moral truth. |
| alliteration | Repetition of the same sound, usually initial, in two or more words. |
| anaphora | Repetition of a word, usually at the beginning of successive clauses or phrases, for emphasis or for pathetic effect. |
| apostrophe | Address of an absent person or abstraction, usually for pathetic effect. |
| assonance | The close recurrence of similar sounds, usually used of vowel sounds. |
| asyndeton | Omission of conjunctions in a closely related series. |
| chiasmus | Arrangement of words, usually adjectives and nouns, in the pattern ABAB. |
| ecphrasis | An apparent digression describing a place (or work of art), connected at the end of the description to the main narrative by hic or huc. |
| ellipsis | Omission of one or more words necessary to the sense. |
| enjambment | The running over of a sentence from one verse into another so that closely related words fall in different lines. |
| hendiadys | Use of two nouns connected by a conjunction with the meaning of one modified noun. |
| hyperbole | Exaggeration for effect. |
| hysteron proteron | Reversal of the natural and logical order of events or ideas. |
| interlocking word order or synchesis | ABAB arrangement of pairs of words. This arrangement often emphasizes the close association of the pairs. |
| irony | The use, clearly intentional or apparently unintentional (dramatic irony), of words with a meaning contrary to the situation. |
| litotes | An understatement for emphasis, usually an assertion of something by denying the opposite. |
| metonymy | Use of one noun in place of another closely related one to avoid common or prosaic words. |
| onomatopeia | Use of words whose sound suggests the sense. |
| oxymoron | The use of apparently contradictory words in the same phrase. |
| pleonasm | Use of unecessary words. |
| polysyndeton | Use of necessary conjunctions. |
| praeteritio | Claiming to pass over something that one plans to say. |
| prolepsis | Use of a word before it is appropriate in the context. A proleptic adjective does not apply to its noun until after the action of the verb. |
| simile | An expresed comparison, introduced by a word such as similis, qualis, or velut. |
| synecdoche | Use of the part for the whole to avoid common words or to focus attention on a particular part. |
| tmesis | Separation of the parts of a compound word usually for metrical convenience. |
| transferred epithet | A device of emphasis in which the poet attributes some characteristics of a thing to another thing closely associated with it. |
| tricolon crescens | A three-part increase of emphasis or enlargement of meaning. |
| zeugma | A linking of one verb or adjective with two distinct words or clauses; often the connection to the one seems more natural than to the other. |
