Terms : Hide Images
| 4361011059 | Anachronism | The misplacement of a person, occurrence, custom, or idea in time; also sometimes refers to an individual or thing that is incorrectly placed in time. | 0 | |
| 4361013521 | Catharsis | A cleansing or purification of one's emotions through art. | 1 | |
| 4361015162 | Propaganda | Ideas, facts, or allegations spread to persuade others to support one's cause or to go against the opposing cause. | 2 | |
| 4361016748 | Antithesis: the contrasting of ideas by the use of parallel structure in phrases or clauses. | "I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him." | 3 | |
| 4361018902 | Parody | A humorous and often satirical imitation of the style or particular work of another author. | 4 | |
| 4361021287 | Metonymy: a figure of speech in which something is referred to by one of its attributes. | "The crown carries many responsibilities." | 5 | |
| 4361024225 | Allegory | A narrative in which literal meaning corresponds directly with symbolic meaning. | 6 | |
| 4361025458 | Ambiguity | A word or idea that can be understood in multiple ways; frequently refers to the condition of being obscure or difficult to understand. | 7 | |
| 4361027096 | Alliteration: the repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants, at the beginning of words. | "Barber, baby, bubbles, and a bumblebee" | 8 | |
| 4361029899 | Prose | Any composition not written in verse. | 9 | |
| 4361031135 | Nostalgia | A yearning for the past or for some condition or state of existence that cannot be recovered. | 10 | |
| 4361032503 | Litotes: deliberate understatement, in which an idea or opinion is often affirmed by negating its opposite. | "It's nothing. I'm just bleeding to death is all." | 11 | |
| 4361035986 | Hyperbole: excessive overstatement or conscious exaggeration of fact. | "I've told you this a million times already." | 12 | |
| 4361041061 | Satire | "A work that ridicules the shortcomings of individuals, institutions, or society, often to make a political point." | 13 | |
| 4361043084 | Diction | Specific word choice used in a piece of writing, often chosen for effect but also for correctness and clarity. | 14 | |
| 4361045352 | Oxymoron: the association of two contradictory terms. | "Same difference;" "Jumbo shrimp;" "Soft rock." | 15 | |
| 4361049704 | Metaphor: the comparison of unlike things without the use of like or as. | "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage." | 16 | |
| 4361052788 | Logos | Greek for "wisdom" or "reason"; in the context of rhetoric, refers to the process of persuading by means of logic and reason, as opposed to style, authority, or emotion. | 17 | |
| 4361054532 | Parable | A short narrative that illustrates a moral by means of allegory (in which literal meaning and symbolic meaning correspond clearly and directly). | 18 | |
| 4361056191 | Sarcasm: a simple form of verbal irony, in which it is obvious from context and tone that the speaker means the opposite of what he or she says. | Saying "that was graceful" when someone trips and falls. | 19 | |
| 4361060145 | Onomatopoeia: the use of words that sound like the thing or action to which they refer. | "Bow-wow. Crackle. Buzz. Zoom." | 20 | |
| 4361062981 | Denotation | The explicit, literal meaning of a word. | 21 | |
| 4361066250 | Imagery | Language that brings to mind sense-impressions, especially via figures of speech | 22 | |
| 4361071150 | Ellipsis | A figure of speech in which a word pr short phrase is omitted, but easily understood from the context; also the marks (...) that indicates the omission of a word or phrase. | 23 | |
| 4361073567 | Foreshadowing | To present ideas, images, events, or comments that hint at events to come in a story. | 24 | |
| 4361074381 | Pathos | From the Greek word for "feeling"; the quality in a work of literature that evokes high emotion, most commonly sorrow, pity, or compassion. | 25 | |
| 4361076513 | Personification: the use of human characteristics to describe animals, objects, or ideas. | "The handsome houses on the street to the college were not fully awake, but they looked very friendly." | 26 | |
| 4361083345 | Expository | An explanation of the meaning or purpose of a piece of writing, especially one that is difficult to understand. | 27 | |
| 4361085583 | Dramatic irony: a technique in which the author lets the reader in on a character's situation while the character remains in the dark. | In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus vows to discover his father's murderer, not knowing, as the audience does, that he himself is the murderer. | 28 | |
| 4361090681 | Anaphora: repeated use of a word or phrase at the start of successive phrases or sentences for effect. | "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills." | 29 | |
| 4361093990 | Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part of an entity is used to refer to the whole. | "One thousand sails pursued Paris when he fled with Helen of Troy." | 30 | |
| 4361101400 | Inductive reasoning: reasoning in which one arrives at a general conclusion from specific instances. | "I got hives from the shrimp I ate last night. I must be allergic to shellfish." | 31 | |
| 4361105181 | Digression | To turn or move away from the main subject of discussion or the main argument in a piece of writing. | 32 | |
| 4361107591 | Apostrophe: a direct address to an absent or dead person, or to an object, quality, or idea. | Walt Whitman's poem "O Captain, My Captain" was written upon the death of Abraham Lincoln | 33 | |
| 4361112163 | Chiasmus: two phrases in which the syntax is the same but placement of words is reversed. | "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." | 34 | |
| 4361121379 | Stream-of-consciousness | Form of narration in which the narrator conveys a subject's thoughts, impressions, and perceptions exactly as they occur, often in disjointed fashion and without the logic and grammar of typical speech and writing. | 35 | |
| 4361124261 | Situational irony | A technique in which one understanding of a situation stands in sharp contrast to another, usually more prevalent, understanding of the same situation. | 36 | |
| 4361127431 | Caricature | In writing and literature, an author's exaggeration or distortion of certain traits or characteristics of an individual. | 37 | |
| 4361129042 | Bildungsroman | A novel about the education or psychological growth of the protagonist, or main character. | 38 | |
| 4361131955 | Epithet: an adjective or phrase that describes a prominent or distinguishing feature of a person or thing. | "The wine-dark sea" | 39 | |
| 4361136368 | Cliche: an expression that has been used so frequently it has lost its expressive power. | "Avoid it like the plague." | 40 |
