About Poetry – Figures of Speech

The Top 20 Figures of Speech

1. Alliteration – the repetition of an initial consonant sound.
2. Anaphora – the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
3. Antithesis – the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
4. Apostrophe – reaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character.
5. Assonance – identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
6. Chiasmus – a verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed.
7. Euphemism – the substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.
8. Hyperbole – an extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
9. Irony – the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. Also, a statement or situation where the meaning is contradicted by the appearance or presentation of the idea.
10. Litotes – a figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.
11. Metaphor – an implied comparison between two unlike things that actually have something important in common.
12. Metonymy – a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it’s closely associated; also, the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it.
13. Onomatopoeia – the use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
14. Oxymoron – a figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side.
15. Paradox – a statement that appears to contradict itself.
16. Personification – a figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities.
17. Pun – aplay on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
18. Simile – a stated comparison (usually formed with “like” or “as”) between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common.
19. Synecdoche – 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”).
20. Understatement – a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.

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