Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A traditional theme or motif; a literary convention.
Wiktionary
- n. A literary theme or motif; a rhetorical convention or formula.
- n. mathematics A certain mathematical structure found in category theory.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a traditional theme or motif or literary convention
Etymologies
- From Ancient Greek τόπος (topos, "place"). Compare topic. (Wiktionary)
- Greek, short for (koinos) topos, (common)place. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Aristotle says: “we must find the location (topos) from which to attack,” where the word ˜topos™ is obviously used to mean a starting point for attacking the theses of the opponents.”
“The notion of topos is due for a revival, especially if we are to consider seriously the recuperation of sentimental poetry and the many women poets who do not invest in the masculinised rhetorics of anti-rhetoric proffered in the Lyrical Ballads model of Romantic-period literary history.”
“In addition, help was offered by a search-and-rescue group called "topos" -- (moles) -- organized by youths who dug through collapsed buildings after Mexico City's 1985 earthquake.”
“Very roughly, a topos is a category possessing a logical structure sufficiently rich to develop most of”
“The inscription found on a portico base was identified as a topos inscription by Professor Dennis Feissel in Paris -- "pro teketai [iu] lianou," or "the place reserved for [Ju] lian.”
“Now a topos is a motif which takes the form of a literary commonplace or rhetorical set-piece: e.g., the comparison between nature and a book or between the world and the theater.”
“7 This topos has been a subject of well known investigations from Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton 1967), 319-326, to Jacques Derrida, Of”
“When English lawyer Sir Thomas More--a devout Roman Catholic--coined the word "utopia" to describe his imaginary island nation in the early 16th century, it was a play on the Greek eu-topos, meaning "good place" and ou-topos, meaning "no place".”
Forbes: Forbes Faces Of The Week: Feb. 27-Mar. 3, 2006Faces Of The Week: Feb. 27-Mar. 3, 2006
“These are "topos" ( "place") inscriptions followed by a name in the possessive case, which gave official authorization to a particular salesman to use this spot.”
“So it appears that Percy Shelley developed an oppositional poetics which pitted one kind of topos against another.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘topos’.
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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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ADW2
nudnik, temper, intercalate, cleave, scowl, chapfallen, malapropos, disport, annals, paean, paradisiacal, whet and 362 more...
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traipsin' 'long through dis 'ear book...
Words which are either entirely new to me or;
Words which I comprehend generally but would prefer a more precise definition.
venality, seigneurial, mendicant, perforce, manse, glebe, trenchant, saw, obstreperous, profligate, dissipation, galliard and 176 more...
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Interesting words
ineffable, effable, immutable, amorphous, parochial, salient, ascertain, circumspect, congenial, coeval, aversion, edification and 117 more...
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words
diplopic, dolorous, farrago, surety, scuttlebutt, Arabesque, infarct, neurasthenia, lambent, expurge, univocal, simper and 395 more...
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solarider's Words
maelstrom, leviathan, apiology, deconstruction, confluence, minutiae, onomatopoeia, tardy, ad infintum, tocophobia, cuckold, oblique and 110 more...
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5-0
Hecko, words! I’m so happy I’ve found you. I want to keep you all and never want to lose you again. I hope you like it here.
amscray, thistledown, tine, tinsel, pungent, snarl, wail, lanky, viscid, dawdle, luminous, stow and 2719 more...
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words to know
proselytising, proprioception, qualia, indelibly, eristic, mellifluous, perspicacious, concilience, inure, tendentiousness, topos, parochial and 118 more...
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rememberers
prolix, ageusia, animadversion, anodyne, antic, arabesque, beadle, brachymetropia, colophon, desquamation, diaphoresis, diegesis and 3250 more...
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2012 Words
Words looked up in 2012
portcullis, demonian, lanceolate, chamfer, ochreous, attar, verdure, palter, tergiversation, punctilios, pellucid, excrescence and 71 more...
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just because
Not all English. Apologies.
bongo-bongoism, spiv, igg, wormwood, umbra, circean, woodnote, dormouse, ben trovato, exonym, apologetics, tuesday and 8 more...
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litany of lexical likes
words I find interesting or that stuck in my head or that I want to revisit at some point
loblolly, animadvert, misoneism, outrance, chokedamp, appropinquate, noesis, cataphor, flabbergastment, godforsaken, mendacity, sussurus and 86 more...
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Literary / Aesthetic
Gongorism, paracinema, avantronica, arrière-garde, chrestomathy, diorama, philological, ideographic, daguerreotype, litterateur, pasticcio, mimeticism and 59 more...
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mathematical jargon
pointless space, monoid, group, category, functor, homomorphism, kernel, endomorphism, endomorphism, hylomorphism, automorphism, topos and 19 more...
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Words I had to Look Up. Srsly.
These are words I've encountered reading that I've had to look up on-the-spot.
execrable, ex cathedra, liminal, elegiac, synecdoche, desuetude, disingenuous, parallelopiped, vulpine, probity, amanuensis, mustelid and 67 more...
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m1ke101's Words
stochastic, amenable, ground truth, perturbation, modality, zeitgeist, liturgy, self-construal, socius, monolithic, unitary, archetype and 21 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for topos.

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