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Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
Antiphrasis is the rhetorical device of saying the opposite of what is actually meant in such a way that it is obvious what the true intention is. [1] Some authors treat and use antiphrasis just as irony, euphemism or litotes. [2] When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings ...
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
In rhetoric, a rhetorical device, persuasive device, or stylistic device is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a perspective, using language designed to encourage or provoke an emotional display of a given perspective or action.
The original edition had 15,000 words and each successive edition has been larger, [3] with the most recent edition (the eighth) containing 443,000 words. [6] The book is updated regularly and each edition is heralded as a gauge to contemporary terms; but each edition keeps true to the original classifications established by Roget. [2]
In editorial practice, a trope is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". [2] Semantic change has expanded the definition of the literary term trope to also describe a writer's usage of commonly recurring an overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations) [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] motifs ...
It is a sister site to The Free Dictionary and usage examples in the form of "references in classic literature" taken from the site's collection are used on The Free Dictionary 's definition pages. In addition, double-clicking on a word in the site's collection of reference materials brings up the word's definition on The Free Dictionary.
The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. [21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested [ 22 ] [ 23 ] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are ...