Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The use of circumlocution.
- n. A circumlocution.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A roundabout way of speaking; a roundabout phrase or expression; the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea; a phrase employed to avoid a common and trite manner of expression; circumlocution.
- n. Synonyms Circumlocution, etc. See pleonasm.
Wiktionary
- n. The use of a longer expression instead of a shorter one with a similar meaning, for example "I am going to" instead of "I will".
- n. Expressing a grammatical meaning (such as a tense) using a syntactic construction rather than morphological marking.
- n. The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name (a species of circumlocution)
- n. The use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. See periphrase.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a style that involves indirect ways of expressing things
Etymologies
- Latin, from Greek, from periphrazein, to express periphrastically : peri-, peri- + phrazein, to say; see gwhren- in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“Which is not the same, although a close periphrasis.”
“Para-puh-lease, but this periphrasis was most beneficial to my lexicon.”
“And unlike most other adjectives in -ly, like friendly or portly, gingerly has an adverbial meaning, so that it can only apply to nominals denoting actions like "step" in Ekholm and Schmidt's article; otherwise it requires a clumsy periphrasis like "in a gingerly way.”
“Discussions on how to increase numbers of women MP’s have become laden with disingenuous periphrasis, intellectual dishonesty and verbal legerdemain.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘periphrasis’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Rhetorical Devices
syllepsis, zeugma, trope, wellerism, anastrophe, anaphora, apostrophe, metonymy, chiasmus, antimetabole, syncope, open-list and 431 more...
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Ways to find out
a good way, the hard way, one way, on the road to, a bad way, an easy way, another way, my way, edgeways, know way, thoroughfare, back way and 42 more...
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peripatetics
words come uponn
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Metawords
Talking about talking, writing about writing, etc.
epizeuxis, tautological, aptote, bibliophagist, parataxis, scriptorium, aposiopesis, variorum, chantefable, boustrophedon, psellism, adoxography and 17 more...
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Language, words, letters
backronym, Logogriph, logodaedaly, Acrostic, tmesis, pleonasm, sesquipedality, periphrasis, peroration, solecism, longueur, periphrastic and 7 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1268 more...
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exlotuseater's Words
autocthonous, anacoluthon, benthic, bactrian, caryatid, chiastic, dryad, dromedary, effulgent, elixir, fricative, fungible and 145 more...
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I, Claudius
Words taken from I, Claudius by Robert Graves.
evocation, aureus, sestertii, denarii, assegai, pilum, framea, sibyl, propitiatory, duenna, tyrannicide, maggoty and 136 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, P
pellucid, pertain, pampas, prate, pinecone, philistine, pantocrator, papaverine, postmeridian, potlatch, pharology, pinniped and 621 more...
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Wordnik Notebooks
All the words from the cover of the Wordnik notebook.
A few words appear twice: frass, cruet, luna, thalweg, and possibly some more.
Careful: Contains spoilers!spilth, frass, fomite, rux, worricow, alizarin, mundungus, parthenocarpy, jib, whinyard, weisure, nimiety and 217 more...
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Tawkward
Verbal 'wtf' exchanges; odd moments of conversation and socializing.
somniloquy, bafflegab, syllepsis, sesquipedalian, whinge, divulge, anacoluthon, anaphora, sumpsimus, persiflage, eristic, overtones and 198 more...
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What David Foster Wallace Circled in His Dictio...
http://www.slate.com/id/2250784/
ablative absolute, ablaut, abulia, acephalous, ACTH, adit, adumbrate, agrapha, aleatory, ailanthus, alfresco, algolagnia and 482 more...
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rememberers
prolix, ageusia, animadversion, anodyne, antic, arabesque, beadle, brachymetropia, colophon, desquamation, diaphoresis, diegesis and 2770 more...
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Vocab
All the words I've come across whose definitions I did not know then.
aberration, abrogate, abscond, abstruse, acolyte, actuate, adulation, advert, aggrandize, aggro, ague, alimony and 273 more...


sitting Indian-style in airliner seats
that have washed up on the shore,
calling the snake a rope and the rope a belt—
initiates of a time periphrasis so elaborate
that even Virgil gets a little cross"
from Postpoem by Rick Snyder, in Escape from Combray, p 9 Oct 7, 2010