The Top 20 Figures of Speech

Alliteration
Repetition of an initial consonant sound.
"The daily diary of the American dream."
(slogan of The Wall Street Journal)

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

 "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."
(Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely)

Antithesis
The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
 "You're easy on the eyes
Hard on the heart."
(Terri Clark)
 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was
the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all
going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."
(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

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

 "Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own."
(Lorenz Hart, "Blue Moon")

 "I believe it is the lost wisdom of my grandfather

Whose ways were his own and who died before I could ask.

"Forerunner, I would like to say, silent pilot,

Little dry death, future,
Your indirections are as strange to me
As my own. I know so little that anything
You might tell me would be a revelation."
(W.S. Merwin, "Sire")
 "O stranger of the future!
O inconceivable being!
Assonance
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in
neighboring words.
"I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless."
(Thin Lizzy, "With Love")

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

 "Nice to see you, to see you, nice!"

(British TV entertainer Bruce Forsyth)

 "You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
(Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Knopf, 2006)
 "I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."
(Ovid)
 "Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth I.i)
 "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."
(Samuel Johnson)

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

 Pre-owned for used or second-hand; enhanced interrogation for torture; wind for belch
or fart; convenience fee for surcharge

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

 "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."
(Kent Brockman, The Simpsons)

“I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse!”

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.

 "It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, launder became a dirty word."
(William Zinsser)

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

(Sideshow Bob, The Simpsons)

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

 The grave's a fine a private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace."
(Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

 "We are not amused."

(attributed to Queen Victoria)
 "I'm not doing this for my health."
(O.J. Simpson, in a paid appearance at a horror comic book convention

Metaphor
An implied comparison between two unlike things that actually
have something important in common.
"The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner."
(Cynthia Ozick, "Rosa")

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.

such as "crown" for "royalty"). Metonymy is also the rhetorical strategy of describing
something indirectly by referring to things around it, such as describing someone's clothing to
characterize the individual.
"Detroit is still hard at work on an SUV that runs on rain forest trees and panda blood."
(Conan O'Brien)
"The B.L.T. left without paying."
(waitress referring to a customer)

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

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

"act naturally," "original copy," "found missing," "alone together," "peace force," "definite
possibility," "terribly pleased," "real phony," "ill health," "turn up missing," "jumbo shrimp,"
"alone together," “pretty ugly”

Paradox
A statement that appears to contradict itself.

 "War is peace."
"Freedom is slavery."
"Ignorance is strength."
(George Orwell, 1984)
 "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that concern for
one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a
rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon
as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be
crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he
flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had
to."
(Joseph Heller, Catch-22)
 "Paradox of Success: the more successful a policy is in warding off some unwanted
condition the less necessary it will be thought to maintain it. If a threat is successfully
suppressed, people naturally wonder why we should any longer bother with it."
(James Piereson, "On the Paradox of Success." Real Clear Politics, Sep. 11, 2006)
 "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)

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

 "Fear knocked on the door. Faith answered. There was no one there."
(proverb quoted by Christopher Moltisanti, The Sopranos)

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

 "When it pours, it reigns."

(slogan of Michelin tires)

 "What food these morsels be!"

(slogan of Heinz pickles, 1938)
 "American Home has an edifice complex."
(slogan of American Home magazine)
 "Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight"
(Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night")
 "Look deep into our ryes."
(slogan of Wigler's Bakery)
 "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."
(Fred Allen)
 A vulture boards a plane, carrying two dead possums. The attendant looks at him and
says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

Simile
A stated comparison (usually formed with "like" or "as") between
two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in
common.

Synecdoche
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. (form of
metonymy)

 9/11

 white-collar criminals

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

"I have to have this operation. It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain."
(Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye, by J. D. Salinger)