The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test
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| 4224814042 | Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses and qualities of beauty. | 0 | |
| 4224814043 | Allegory | A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself. | 1 | |
| 4224814044 | Alliteration | The repetition of sounds at the beginning of words. | 2 | |
| 4224814045 | Allusion | A reference to another work or famous figure. | 3 | |
| 4224814046 | Anachronism | "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting. | 4 | |
| 4224814047 | Analogy | A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship. | 5 | |
| 4224814048 | Anecdote | A short story; usually interesting or amusing to make some point. | 6 | |
| 4224814049 | Antecedent | The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to. | 7 | |
| 4224814050 | Anthropomorphism | When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. | 8 | |
| 4224814051 | Anticlimax | Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect. | 9 | |
| 4224814052 | Antihero | A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. Consider Winston in 1984. | 10 | |
| 4224814053 | Aphorism | A short and usually witty saying. | 11 | |
| 4224814054 | Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker addresses someone or something that is not present; often abstract. Usually begins with "O...". | 12 | |
| 4224814055 | Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. | 13 | |
| 4224814056 | Aside | A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage. | 14 | |
| 4224814058 | Assonance | The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul." | 15 | |
| 4224814060 | Ballad | A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality. | 16 | |
| 4224814064 | Bombast | Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language. | 17 | |
| 4224814066 | Cacophony | In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds. | 18 | |
| 4224814069 | Caricature | A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality. | 19 | |
| 4224814070 | Catharsis | A release of strong emotions. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play. | 20 | |
| 4224814071 | Chorus | In Greek drama, the group of citizens who act as the common man and provide "voice of reason" and commentary on the play. | 21 | |
| 4224814073 | Neologism | A new word, usually one invented on the spot. | 22 | |
| 4224814074 | Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. Informal diction. | 23 | |
| 4224814076 | Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. | 24 | |
| 4224814077 | Denotation | A word's literal meaning. | 25 | |
| 4224814078 | Connotation | Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies. | 26 | |
| 4224814079 | Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds within or at the end of words words (rather than at their beginnings) | 27 | |
| 4224814080 | Couplet | A pair of lines that end in rhyme | 28 | |
| 4224814082 | Diction | The words an author chooses to use. | 29 | |
| 4224814083 | Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words within a sentence; also consider punctuation. | 30 | |
| 4224814084 | Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy | 31 | |
| 4224814086 | Doggerel | Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks. Subject matter is tired and trite, sounds heavy-handed. | 32 | |
| 4224814087 | Dramatic Irony | When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not. | 33 | |
| 4224814089 | Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful, usually mournful manner. | 34 | |
| 4224814091 | Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. | 35 | |
| 4224814092 | Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. | 36 | |
| 4224814093 | Epitaph | Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place. | 37 | |
| 4224814094 | Euphemism | A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality. | 38 | |
| 4224814095 | Euphony | When sounds blend harmoniously. | 39 | |
| 4224814096 | Explicit | To say or write something directly and clearly. | 40 | |
| 4224814098 | Feminine rhyme | Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed. | 41 | |
| 4224814099 | Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. | 42 | |
| 4224814100 | Foot | The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed. | 43 | |
| 4224814101 | Foreshadowing | An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later. | 44 | |
| 4224814102 | Free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern | 45 | |
| 4224814105 | Hubris | Excessive pride or arrogance. | 46 | |
| 4224814106 | Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. | 47 | |
| 4224814107 | Implicit | To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly. | 48 | |
| 4224814108 | In media res | Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginningin the middle of the action. | 49 | |
| 4224814110 | Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. Inverted syntax is common in Shakespeare. | 50 | |
| 4224814111 | Verbal irony | A statement made in which the speaker intentionally says the opposite of what they mean. | 51 | |
| 4224814117 | Masculine rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) | 52 | |
| 4224814119 | Melodrama | A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure. | 53 | |
| 4224814120 | Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another. | 54 | |
| 4224814121 | Simile | A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as. | 55 | |
| 4224814122 | Metonymy | A word (a part) that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with (the whole). Ex: All hands on deck! Ex: Go check out John's new wheels! | 56 | |
| 4224814123 | Nemesis | The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty. | 57 | |
| 4224814124 | Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. | 58 | |
| 4224814125 | Subjectivity | A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses. | 59 | |
| 4224814126 | Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean | 60 | |
| 4224814127 | Juxtapose | To place things next to each other to invite contrast or dissimilarity. | 61 | |
| 4224814128 | Oxymoron | Words that seem to be opposites of each other that work together in the broader context. Ex: jumbo shrimp; pretty ugly. | 62 | |
| 4224814129 | Parable | A simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. | 63 | |
| 4224814130 | Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection reveals some sort of greater truth. | 64 | |
| 4224814132 | Paraphrase | To restate phrases and sentences in your own words. | 65 | |
| 4224814133 | Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. | 66 | |
| 4224814134 | Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. | 67 | |
| 4224814135 | Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. | 68 | |
| 4224814136 | Persona | The speaker created by the author that is not the author himself/herself. Consider "Death of The Ball Turret Gunner". | 69 | |
| 4224814137 | Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human shape. | 70 | |
| 4224814139 | Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. | 71 | |
| 4224814140 | Omniscient point of view | A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. | 72 | |
| 4224814141 | Limited Omniscient point of view | A third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees (=limited), and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character. | 73 | |
| 4224814142 | Third person objective point of view | A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it. | 74 | |
| 4224814143 | First person | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view. Uses "I". | 75 | |
| 4224814144 | Stream of Consciousness | Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness. | 76 | |
| 4224814146 | Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play | 77 | |
| 4224814147 | Pun | The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings | 78 | |
| 4224814148 | Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem. | 79 | |
| 4224814151 | Rhetorical question | A question that suggests an answer. | 80 | |
| 4224814153 | Soliloquy | A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts. | 81 | |
| 4224814154 | Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. | 82 | |
| 4224814155 | Stock characters | Standard or cliched character types. | 83 | |
| 4224814158 | Summary | A simple retelling of what you've just read. | 84 | |
| 4224814160 | Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea. | 85 | |
| 4224814161 | Technique | The methods and tools of the author. | 86 | |
| 4224814162 | Theme | A main idea of the overall work; a central idea. | 87 | |
| 4224814163 | Thesis | The main position of an argument. The central claim that will be supported. | 88 | |
| 4224814164 | Tragic flaw | In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise. | 89 | |
| 4224814167 | Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible. | 90 | |
| 4224814168 | Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. | 91 | |
| 4224814170 | Ode | A poem in praise of something divine or noble | 92 | |
| 4224814171 | Iamb | A poetic foot -- light, heavy | 93 | |
| 4224814172 | Trochee | A poetic foot -- heavy, light | 94 | |
| 4224814173 | Spondee | A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy | 95 | |
| 4224814175 | Anapest | A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy | 96 | |
| 4224814177 | Dactyl | A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light | 97 | |
| 4224814179 | Pentameter | A poetic line with five feet. | 98 | |
| 4224814180 | Tetrameter | A poetic line with four feet | 99 | |
| 4224814181 | Trimeter | A poetic line with three feet | 100 | |
| 4224814182 | Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. | 101 | |
| 4224968753 | Asyndeton | The absence or omission of conjunctions (and, but, yet, etc.) between parts of a sentence. | 102 | |
| 4224975106 | Polysyndeton | When several coordinating conjunctions are used in close succession (ex: He went to the store, and bought some milk, and took it home, and fed the dog, and kissed his mom). | 103 | |
| 4224985477 | Prosody | The overall picture of rhythm/meter in a poem that includes the baseline rhythm/meter and mentions of variations. | 104 | |
| 4224992038 | Scansion | The act of reading and measuring the stresses and un-stresses to find the rhythm & meter of a poem. | 105 | |
| 4224996528 | Motif | A repeating idea, image, word, etc., that supports the development of a theme. | 106 | |
| 4224999881 | Caesura | A pause in a line of poetry as evidenced by punctuation (commas, colons, semicolons, etc.). | 107 | |
| 4225003829 | imagery | Language that strongly appeals to the 5 senses. Usually creates strong mental pictures or the sense that you can so clearly hear/touch/taste/smell whatever is being described. | 108 | |
| 4225016100 | blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter | 109 | |
| 4225018268 | heroic couplet | a couplet (two lines) of rhymed iambic pentameter | 110 | |
| 4225022809 | situational irony | When the outcome is the opposite of what is expected; a direct reversal. | 111 | |
| 4225045813 | English sonnet | 3 quatrains and a couplet: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. | 112 | |
| 4225047595 | Italian sonnet | An octave followed by a sestet: abba, abba, cd,cd,cd/cde,cde/cdc,cdc. | 113 | |
| 4225054811 | Ballad stanza | A quatrain with alternating lines of 6 and 8 syllables: abcb. | 114 |
