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Anaphora – a succession of sentences beginning with the same word or group of words. Anastrophe – inversion of the natural word order. Anecdote – a brief narrative describing an interesting or amusing event. Antanaclasis – a figure of speech involving a pun, consisting of the repeated use of the same word, each time with different meanings.
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 ...
A list of 100 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts in the English language, comprising over 2 billion words). [1] A part of speech is provided for most of the words, but part-of-speech categories vary between analyses, and not all ...
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.
Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period [1] A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are ...
Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men"). During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech.
Hyperbole is often used for emphasis or effect. In casual speech, it functions as an intensifier: [5] [3] saying "the bag weighed a ton" [6] simply means that the bag was extremely heavy. [7] The rhetorical device may be used for serious or ironic or comic effects. [8] Understanding hyperbole and its use in context can help understand the ...
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of British words not widely used in the United States; List of South African English regionalisms; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: A–L; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z