Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An expression that uses language in a nonliteral way, such as a metaphor or synecdoche, or in a structured or unusual way, such as anaphora or chiasmus, or that employs sounds, such as alliteration or assonance, to achieve a rhetorical effect.
Wiktionary
- n. idiomatic A word or phrase that departs from straightforward, literal language.
WordNet 3.0
- n. language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense
Examples
“It was now a mere figure of speech to call them so, though, in their home-talk, loving simplicity, they would neither have been ashamed nor annoyed at the epithet – these two tall lads, who in the dusk looked as man-like as their father.”
“This involves a figure of speech but does not yet, as K.W. contends, establish the meaning of "tribe" for”
“Off the wall, hyphenated as above when used as a compound modifier of the word it precedes, is a figure of speech that shows staying power.”
Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time
“The fresh figure of speech racing through the lingo of the edge-cutting calls up the image of a runner straining ahead, the tilt of the body throwing weight forward to aid acceleration.”
Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time
“Mostly it was just a figure of speech but now and then a child was beaten to death for his sneakers, a baby smothered because it cried,”
“Even so eminent an economist as Irving Fisher of Yale was lulled by the superficial evidences of prosperity into announcing that we were marching along a “permanently high plateau”—a figure of speech given a macabre humor by the fact that stocks fell off the brink of that plateau one week to the day after he made his statement.”
“Whether this be a mere figure of speech used by that scurrilous lampooner, or whether it indicates that the work was circulated by the religious professors of that period, I cannot determine.”
The Practice of Piety: Directing a Christian How to Walk, that He May Please God.
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘figure of speech’.
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Wordplay & Pun
wordplay, pound, conceit, clinch, joke, quibble, equivoque, double-entendre, quillet, calembour, carriwitchet, paranomasia and 90 more...
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EN - eloquence in public speaking
Key words from "The Training of a Public Speaker" by Grenville Kleiser (New York and London, 1920)
beget, imago, approbation, orator, peroration, Cicero, eloquence, elocution, rhetoric, premeditate, plead, Isocrates and 264 more...
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Rhetoric: The Harlot of the Arts
Words to do with rhetoric--study of, history of, practice of, theory of
rhetoric, paralepsis, invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery, copia, consubstantiation, trope, colon, tricolon and 56 more...
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working list
overkill, premonition, discombobulation, golliwogs, guerilla, paraphernalia, banter, gambit, atonement, leeway, ingenuity, haberdashery and 164 more...
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APLIT Poetry Word List
enjambment, epigram, antithesis, caesura, consonance, apostrophe, assonance, conceit, litotes, heroic couplet, scansion, ballad and 8 more...
Tweets
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