The Top 20 Figures for BA in English
The Top 20 Figures
- Alliteration
The repetition of an initial consonant sound.
- Anaphora
The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses. (Contrast with epiphora and epistrophe.)
- Antithesis
The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
- Apostrophe
Breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character.
- Assonance
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
- Chiasmus
A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed.
- Euphemism
The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.
- Hyperbole
An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
- 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.
- Litotes
A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.
- Metaphor
An implied comparison between two unlike things that actually have something important in common.
- 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.
- Onomatopoeia
The use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
- Oxymoron
A figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side.
- Paradox
A statement that appears to contradict itself.
- Personification
A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities.
- Pun
A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
- 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 in which a part is used to represent the whole (for example, ABCs for alphabet) or the whole for a part ("England won the World Cup in 1966").
A figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is