A figure of speech is a rhetorical device that achieves a special effect by using words in distinctive ways.

Though there are hundreds of figures of speech (many of them included in our Tool Kit for Rhetorical
Analysis), here we'll focus on just 20 of the most common figures.

You will probably remember many of these terms from your English classes. Figurative language is often
associated with literature--and with poetry in particular. But the fact is, whether we're conscious of it or not,
we use figures of speech every day in our own writing and conversations.

For example, common expressions such as "falling in love," "racking our brains," "hitting a sales target,"
and "climbing the ladder of success" are all metaphors--the most pervasive figure of all. Likewise, we rely
on similes when making explicit comparisons ("light as a feather") and hyperbole to emphasize a point
("I'm starving!").

Using original figures of speech in our writing is a way to convey meanings in fresh, unexpected ways.
Figures can help our readers understand and stay interested in what we have to say. For advice on creating
figures of speech, see Using Similes and Metaphors to Enrich Our Writing.

How to Review the Top 20 Figures of Speech

Click on each of the following terms to visit a glossary page. There you will find the
definition and several examples of the figure as well as its etymology (which shows where
the term came from) and a pronunciation guide. For each figure of speech, try to come up
with an example of your ow

The Top 20 Figures

1. Alliteration
Repetition of an initial consonant sound.

Ex: "You'll never put a better bit of butter on your knife.

"The soul selects her own society."

"A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow."

2. Anaphora
Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or
verses.

Ex. "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a
home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.

"I don't like you sucking around, bothering our citizens, Lebowski. I don't like your jerk-
off name. I don't like your jerk-off face. I don't like your jerk-off behavior, and I don't
like you, jerk-off."

 I'm
" not afraid to die. I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to
succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might
have to stop talking about myself for five minutes
 3. Antithesis
The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.

Ex. "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing."

"The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression."

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

4. Apostrophe
Breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract
quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character.

Ex. "O western wind, when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?"

"Hello darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again . . .."

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art"

5. Assonance
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.

Ex. "The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in
knots."

"Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

 "The setting sun was licking the hard bright machine like some great invisible
beast on its knees."

6. Chiasmus
A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the
first but with the parts reversed.

Ex. Nice to see you, to see you, nice!"

"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."

"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and
the part that is original is not good."
 7. Euphemism
The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.

Ex. Mr. Prince: We'll see you when you get back from image enhancement camp.
Martin Prince: Spare me your euphemisms! It's fat camp, for Daddy's chubby little
secret!

Paul Kersey: You've got a prime figure. You really have, you know.
Joanna Kersey: That's a euphemism for fat.

 Dr. House: Who were you going to kill in Bolivia? My old housekeeper?
Dr. Terzi: We don't kill anyone.
Dr. House: I'm sorry--who were you going to marginalize?

8. Hyperbole
An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of
emphasis or heightened effect.

Ex.
 "If we're going to start crucifying people for hyperbole in this society, there's going
to be a long line. If I were writing a diet book, I wouldn't say, 'It's going to take a lot of
work and it'll be a pain in the butt.' I'd say, 'Thin thighs in 30 days!'"

 "O for the gift of Rostand's Cyrano to invoke the vastness of that nose alone as it
cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across
our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I can say
without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together."

9. Irony
The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. A statement or
situation where the meaning is contradicted by the appearance or presentation of
the idea.

Ex. It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, launder became a dirty word."

"I'm aware of the irony of appearing on TV in order to decry it."

 "Irony has always been a primary tool the under-powered use to tear at the over-
powered in our culture. But now irony has become the bait that media corporations use to
appeal to educated consumers. . . . It's almost an ultimate irony that those who say they
don't like TV will sit and watch TV as long as the hosts of their favorite shows act like
they don't like TV, either. Somewhere in this swirl of droll poses and pseudo-insights,
irony itself becomes a kind of mass therapy for a politically confused culture. It offers a
comfortable space where complicity doesn't feel like complicity. It makes you feel like
you are counter-cultural while never requiring you to leave the mainstream culture it has
so much fun teasing. We are happy enough with this therapy that we feel no need to enact
social change.

10. Litotes
A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is
expressed by negating its opposite.

Ex. "The grave's a fine a private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace

"'Not a bad day's work on the whole,' he muttered, as he quietly took off his mask, and
his pale, fox-like eyes glittered in the red glow of the fire. 'Not a bad day's work.'"

"for life's not a paragraph

And death I think is no parenthesis"

11. Metaphor
An implied comparison between two unlike things that actually have something
important in common.

Ex. . "The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner."

"But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

"Men's words are bullets, that their enemies take up and make use of against them

12. Metonymy
A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with
which it is closely associated; also, the rhetorical strategy of describing something
indirectly by referring to things around it.

Ex. "Detroit is still hard at work on an SUV that runs on rain forest trees and panda
blood."

"I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All
they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again.

The White House asked the television networks for air time on Monday night.

13. Onomatopoeia
The formation or use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects
or actions they refer to.

Ex. "I'm getting married in the morning!

Ding dong! the bells are gonna chime."
(Lerner and Loewe, "Get Me to the Church on Time," My Fair Lady)
 "[Aredelia] found Starling in the warm laundry room, dozing against the slow rump-
rump of a washing machine."

14. Oxymoron
A figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by
side.

Ex. "A yawn may be defined as a silent yell."

"O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches!"

"That building is a little bit big and pretty ugly."

15. Paradox
A statement that appears to contradict itself.

Ex. "The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot."

"If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness."

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
(C.S. Lewis to his godchild, Lucy Barfield, to whom he dedicated The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe)

16. Personification
A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with
human qualities or abilities.

Ex.  As personifications of their respective nations, England and the U.S., John Bull
and Uncle Sam became popular during the 19th century.

 "The operation is over. On the table, the knife lies spent, on its side, the bloody meal
smear-dried upon its flanks. The knife rests."

 "Personification, with allegory, was the literary rage in the 18th century, but it goes
against the modern grain and today is the feeblest of metaphorical devices.

17. Pun
A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes
on the similar sense or sound of different words.

Ex. "What food these morsels be!"

"American Home has an edifice complex."

 "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."
 18. Simile
A stated comparison (usually formed with "like" or "as") between two
fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common.

Ex. "He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."

"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."

"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

19. Synechdoche
A figure of speech is which a part is used to represent the whole, the whole for a
part, the specific for the general, the general for the specific, or the material for
the thing made from it.

Ex. "The sputtering economy could make the difference if you're trying to get a deal on a
new set of wheels."

"And let us mind, faint heart n'er wan

A lady fair."

"And the Stratocaster guitars slung over

Burgermeister beer guts, and the swizzle stick legs
jackknifed over Naugahyde stools . . ..

20. Understatement
A figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation
seem less important or serious than it is.

Ex. "The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace."

"A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of
beauty."
"This [double helix] structure has novel features which are of considerable biological
interest."

http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/20figures.htm
noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the
main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

Example:

• The runners were fast

• You met Peter Ching.
• Chicago isn't far away.
• We walked in the forests.

Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds
of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In
English, nouns may be defined as those words which can occur with articles and
attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

verb is a word that usually denotes an action (bring, read, walk, run, murder), an
occurrence (decompose, shine), or a state of being (exist, stand). It may also agree with
the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments (subject, object, etc.), as in
English I have versus he has. A verb inflected in this way is known as a finite verb.

Example:
The daredevil cockroach splashed into Sara's soup.
Theo's overworked computer exploded in a spray of sparks.
The curious toddler popped a grasshopper into her mouth.

participle (adjective participial, from Latin participium, a calque of Greek μετοχη

"partaking") is a derivative of a non-finite verb, which can be used in compound tenses or
voices, or as a modifier. Participles often share properties with other parts of speech, in
particular adjectives and nouns.

Example:
The dog, praised by its master, was happy.
The thieves were caught.
She has written a letter.

interjection or exclamation describes a noun without a grammatical connection

with the rest of the sentence and simply expresses emotion on the part of the speaker,
although most interjections have clear definitions. Filled pauses such as uh, er, um, are
also considered interjections. Interjections are typically placed at the beginning of a
sentence or in a sentence by themselves.

Example:

Ah well, it can't be heped.

Oh dear! Does it hurt?

The word "interjection" literally means "thrown in between" from the Latin inter
("between") and iacere ("throw"). Interjections are generally uninflected function words
and have sometimes been seen as sentence-words, because they can replace or be
replaced by a whole sentence (they are holophrastic). Sometimes, however, interjections
combine with other words to form sentences, but not with finite verbs. When an
exclamation point is not needed, a comma can take the place.

Interjections are used when the speaker encounters events that cause emotions. The
emotions are often strong (surprise, disgust, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, etc.), but are not
necessarily so (boredom, irritation, mild surprise, etc.). However, several languages have
interjections that cannot be related to emotions.

pronoun (Lat: pronomen) is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun with or without a
determiner, such as you and they in English. The replaced phrase is called the antecedent
of the pronoun.

Example, "Chicken Nugget the Dilophosaur gave Philipito the Veliociraptor the magic
bread."

"She gave it to him”. The process of determining which antecedent was intended is
known as Anaphore Resolution.

preposition is a part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. For example, in the
sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the
prepositional phrase "on the sofa". In English, the most used prepositions are "of", "to",
"in", "for", "with" and "on". Simply put, a preposition indicates a relation between things
mentioned in a sentence.

preposition, which precedes its phrase,

a postposition, which follows its phrase, and a

circumposition, which surrounds its phrase.

Taken together, these three parts of speech are called adpositions.

adpositions are considered to be members of the syntactic category "P". "PPs",[2]

consisting of an adpositional head and its complement phrase, are used for a wide range
of syntactic and semantic functions, most commonly modification and complementation.
The following examples illustrate some uses of English prepositional phrases:
An adverb is a part of speech. It is any word that modifies any part of language other
than a noun (modifiers of nouns are primarily adjectives and determiners). Adverbs can
modify verbs, adjectives (including numbers), clauses, sentences and other
adverbs.Adverbs typically answer questions such as how?, in what way?, when?, where?,
and to what extent?. In English, they often end in -ly. This function is called the adverbial
function, and is realized not just by single words (i.e., adverbs) but by adverbial phrases
and adverbial clauses.

conjunction (abbreviated CONJ or CNJ) is a part of speech that connects two words,
phrases or clauses together. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of
speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" should be defined for each language. In
general, a conjunction is an invariable grammatical particle, and it may or may not stand
between the items it conjoins.