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English terms
AP English 4
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Allegory | a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. |
| Alliteration | the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. |
| Allusion | an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference. |
| Amplification | expansion of a statement, narrative, etc., as for rhetorical purposes: |
| Anagram | a word, phrase, or sentence formed from another by rearranging its letters |
| Analogy | a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump. |
| Anaphora | Also called epanaphora. Rhetoric. repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive verses, clauses, or sentences. |
| Anastrophe | Inversion of the usual order of words |
| Animism | the belief that natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls. |
| Anthropomorphism | an anthropomorphic conception or representation, as of a deity. |
| Antithesis | the placing of a sentence or one of its parts against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas, |
| Aphorism | a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation |
| Apostrophe/Authorial Intrusion | the sign ('), as used: to indicate the omission of one or more letters in a word, |
| Archetype | the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form; prototype. |
| Assonance | Also called vowel rhyme. Prosody. rhyme in which the same vowel sounds are used with different consonants in the stressed syllables of the rhyming words, as in penitent and reticence. |
| Asyndenton | Omission of conjunctions |
| Bibliomancy | divination by means of a book, especially the Bible, opened at random to some verse or passage, which is then interpreted. |
| Bildungsroman | a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist. |
| Cacophony | harsh discordance of sound; dissonance: |
| Caesura | a division made by the ending of a word within a foot, or sometimes at the end of a foot, especially in certain recognized places near the middle of a verse. |
| Characterization | the creation and convincing representation of fictitious characters, as in a literary work. |
| Chiasmus | a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases, |
| Circumlocution | a roundabout or indirect way of speaking; the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. |
| Conflict | to come into collision or disagreement; be contradictory, at variance, or in opposition; clash: |
| Connotation | something suggested or implied by a word or thing, rather than being explicitly named or described: |
| Consonance | the correspondence of consonants, especially those at the end of a word, in a passage of prose or verse. |
| Denotation | a word that names or signifies something specific: |
| Deus ex Machina | any artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot. |
| Diction | style of speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words: |
| Doppelgänger | a ghostly double or counterpart of a living person. |
| Ekphrastic | a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. |
| Emulation | effort or desire to equal or excel others. |
| Epilogue | a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened. |
| Epithet | an adjective or descriptive phrase expressing a quality characteristic of the person or thing mentioned. |
| Euphemism | a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing. |
| Euphony | the quality of being pleasing to the ear, especially through a harmonious combination of words. the tendency to make phonetic change for ease of pronunciation. |
| Fable | a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral. |
| Faulty Parallelism | is the lack of parallel structure—it creates sentences without a sense of balance. Readers expect parallel word structures especially when there is some underlying parallelism of meaning. |
| Flashback | a scene in a movie, novel, etc., set in a time earlier than the main story. |
| Foil | In fiction, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character. In some cases, a subplot can be used as a foil to the main plot |
| Foreshadowing | warning or indication of (a future event). |
| Hyperbaton | an inversion of the normal order of words, especially for the sake of emphasis |
| Hyperbole | exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally. |
| Imagery | visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work. |
| Internal Rhyme | In poetry, internal rhyme, or middle rhyme, is rhyme that occurs within a single line of verse, or between internal phrases across multiple lines |
| Inversion | syntactic reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence |
| Irony | a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character. |
| Juxtaposition | the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect. |
| Kennings | figurative expression that replaces a name or a noun. Often it is a compound of two words and the words are hyphenated. |
| Malapropism | the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effect, as in, for example, “dance a flamingo ” (instead of flamenco ). |
| Metaphor | figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two. |
| Metonymy | the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant |
| Motif | a distinctive feature or dominant idea in an artistic or literary composition. |
| Mood | the atmosphere or pervading tone of something, especially a work of art. |
| Negative Capability | describes the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts |
| Nemesis | the inescapable agent of someone's or something's downfall. |
| Onomatopoeia | the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named |
| Oxymoron | a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction |
| Parable | a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels. |
| Paradox | a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory. |
| Pathetic Fallacy | literary device wherein the author attributes human emotions and traits to nature or inanimate objects |
| Periphrasis | the use of indirect and circumlocutory speech or writing. |
| Periodic Structure | particular placement of sentence elements such as the main clause of the sentence and/or its predicate are purposely held off and placed at the end instead of at the beginning or their conventional positions |
| Personification | a figure of speech where human qualities are given to animal |
| Point of View | the narrator's position in relation to the story being told. |
| Plot | causal sequence of events |
| Polysyndeton | the use of a number of conjunctions in close succession. |
| Portmanteau | consisting of or combining two or more separable aspects or qualities. |
| Prologue | an event or action that leads to another event or situation. |
| Puns | Also called paronomasia, is a form of word play that suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. |
| Rhyme Scheme | is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. |
| Satire | the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. |
| Setting | the environment in which a story or event takes place. |
| Simile | a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid Key words: like, as |
| Spoonerism | a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect, |
| Stanza | a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a verse. |
| Stream of Consciousness | a literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue |
| Syllepsis | the use of a word or expression to perform two syntactic functions, especially to modify two or more words of which at least one does not agree in number, case, or gender, |
| Symbol | something used for or regarded as representing something else; a material object representing something, often something immaterial; emblem, token, or sign. |
| Synecdoche | a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice verse |
| Synesthesia | is a rhetorical device or figure of speech where one sense is described in terms of another. |
| Syntax | the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. |
| Theme | The subject of a talk, a piece of writing, a person's thoughts, or an exhibition; a topic. |
| Tone | the general character or attitude of a place, piece of writing, situation, etc. |
| Tragedy | is a form of drama based on human suffering |
| Verisimilitude | the appearance of being true or real. |
| Verse | writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme. |
| Authorial Intrusion | literary device wherein the author penning the story, poem or prose steps away from the text and speaks out to the reader |
Created by:
camos0422
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