What are figures of speech?

Answer 1

The Top 20 Figures
1. Alliteration
Repetition of an initial consonant sound.
Eg. -"A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow."
(Vladimir Nabokov, Conclusive Evidence)
-"Guinness is good for you."
(advertising slogan)
-"Good men are gruff and grumpy, cranky, crabbed, and cross."
(Clement Freud)
-"My style is public negotiations for parity, rather than private negotiations for position."
(Jesse Jackson)

2. Anaphora
Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
Eg, "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, 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; we shall never surrender."
3. Antithesis
The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
Eg. "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing."
(Goethe)
4. Apostrophe
Breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character.
Eg. "O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?"
(anonymous, 16th c.)


5. Assonance
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
Eg.  "Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."
(W.B. Yeats, "Byzantium")

6. Chiasmus
A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed.
Eg. "Nice to see you, to see you, nice!"
(British TV entertainer Bruce Forsyth)

7. Euphemism
The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.

• Eg. Dr. House: I'm busy.
Thirteen: We need you to . . .
Dr. House: Actually, as you can see, I'm not busy. It's just a euphemism for "get the h**l out of here."

8. Hyperbole
An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
Eg. "Ladies and gentlemen, I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I can say withouthyperbole 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.


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 is closely associated; also, the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it.
13. Onomatopoeia
The formation or 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
A play 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. 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.
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