| A | B |
|---|
| Obiter Dicta | indidental remarks often prefaced with "Oh, by the way!" |
| Objective Correlative | T.S. Elliot's terms for a pattern of objects, actions, or events that awakens emotional response in the reader |
| Objectivity | when the author presents his characters in an impresonal manner |
| Obligatory Scene | a scene in a play that the audience EXPECTS the dramatist to include |
| Oblique Rhyme | the repetition of like consonant sounds but without similar vowels sound; i.e. peer/pare, up/step |
| Occasional Verse | poetry written for special occasions |
| Octameter | eight metrical feet |
| Ocastitch | an eight line stanza |
| Octave | a line of eight feet |
| Octavo | a book that is made from sheets folded into eight leaves or sixteen pages |
| Octosyllable verse | a tetrameter line containing eight syllables |
| Ode | a long lyric poem about ONE specific subject |
| Omnibus | a work by several authors on one subject |
| Ockham's Razor | the principle of parsimony (stinginess) attributed to William of Ockham |
| Oedipus Complex | a sexual feeling that a child develops for the parent of the opposite sex |
| Omniscient Point of View | where the narrator is capable of knowing, seeing, and telling all |
| Onomatopoeia | words that imitate their natural sounds; hiss, buzz, bow-wow, sizzle |
| Onset | one of three parts of a syllable |
| Open-Endedness | prose or poetry without an end |
| Opera | a musical drama |
| Open Couplet | a couplet in which the second line is not complete |
| Example of an open couplet | "...that's my last Duchess painted on the wall,/Looking as if she were alive. I call/That piece a wonder, now.... |
| Example of open-endedness | She who could never live save through one person,/She who could never speak save to one person,.... |
| Opera Bouffe | A French term for light or comic opera |
| Operetta | a comic opera with music, songs, and spectacular effects |
| Opsis | Aristotle's term for a "spectacle" as an element of drama |
| Outride | coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins for a "slack" or unstressed syllable that is added to a metrical foot |
| Outsider Art | art produced by unrecognized artists and writers |
| Oxford Reformers | humanist scholars who included John Colet, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus |
| Oral Transmission | transmitting information by word of mouth |
| Oration | a formal address delivered on a special occasion |
| Organic Form | poetry that comes from the writer's creativity rather than its form |
| Ottava Rima | an eight-line iambic staza rhyming abababcc |
| Oxymoron | a paradox reduced to two words; "wise fool", "sweet sorrow", etc. |
