List of Technical Terms

-Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a name or phrase stands in for

something else (e.g. light=love in light of my life, etc.).

-Imagery: the use of images within a particular work of extract (a set of words
creates an individual mental image).

-Perfect rhyme: the stressed vowel at the end of the rhyming words are
identical, e.g. sky and high.

-Half rhyme: the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, but the
preceding vowel sounds do not match, e.g. shape and keep.

-Couplet: a pair of successive lines of verse, rhyming and often the same
length.

-Prose: language in its ordinary form, without a structure of metre.

-Metre: the rhythm of a poem split up into feet (with a certain number of
syllables two syllables is iambic (second syllable stressed, e.g. above) or
trochaic (first syllable stressed, e.g. water)). The metre depends on how many
feet there are and which syllable is stressed when you read it.

-Iambic pentameter: a line with five metrical feet, with one unstressed syllable
followed by one stressed syllable, e.g. Two households, both alike in dignity,
or To be or not to be that is the question (this one is one syllable over, called
hypermetrical).

-Pun: a joke using the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that
there are words which sound alike but have different meanings, e.g. Diagon
alley=diagonally, or [Mercutio, when he is dying in Romeo and Juliet]: ask for
me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man [grave can mean serious as
an adjective].

-Sonnet: a poem of fourteen lines. There are different types of sonnet but an
English (or Shakespearean) sonnet usually has ten syllables per line, in iambic
pentameter, made up of three quatrains (four lines) and a final rhyming couplet.
E.g. Shakespeares Sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summers day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summers lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owst;
Nor shall death brag thou wanderst in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growst:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

-Alliteration: the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning

ofadjacent or closely connected word, e.g. A big bad boy called Ben. Sibilance
is the repetition of the s, z, sh, and zh sounds. Assonance is two or more
words close to one another that repeat the same vowel sound but start with
different consonant sounds, e.g. sonnet and porridge, or killed and cold.

-Onomatopoeia: a word made from a sound associated with what is named (e.g. cuckoo,
bang, splash).

-Pathetic Fallacy: the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or
animals, e.g. angry wound and soft skies.

-Personification: giving human characteristics to something non-human; describing an

animal like someone would describe a human, e.g. the cat yelled all night; the wind
groaned
Some More Advanced Terms (For Those Literary Thrill-Seekers Amongst You):
Rhetoric and poetics strophe; stanza; terza rima (A-B-A or C-D-C, etc); ottava rima (abababcc);
villanelle ( a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain); sestina (six
stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi); rondeau (A lyrical poem of French
origin having 13 or sometimes 10 lines with two rhymes throughout and with the opening phrase
repeated twice as a refrain); rhyme royal (seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc);
rhythm; metre; prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech - spondaic, iambic, dactylic, etc.);
sprung rhythm (rhythm designed to imitate rhythm of natural speech, with an initial stressed syllable);
caesura; cadence (momentary variations in rhythm); enjambement; rhyme; couplet; cross rhyme (a
word at the end of a line rhymes with a word in the middle of the next/previous line); half rhyme;
rime riche (rhyme produced by agreement in sound, if not spelling); feminine ending (an unaccented
syllable at the close of a line of poetry); alliteration; assonance; consonance (The repetition of
consonants or of a consonant pattern, especially at the ends of words, as in blank and think or strong
and string); blank verse; free verse; syntax; deixis (words or phrases that cannot be fully understood
without additional contextual information words like there, he, etc); hypotaxis; parataxis; direct,
indirect, and reported speech; free indirect style; dialect; colloquial; homophone; homonym (one of a
group of words that share spelling and pronunciation but may have different meanings); euphony (the
use of phrases and words that are noted for possessing an extensive degree of notable loveliness or
melody in the sound they create); antithesis (when two opposites are introduced in the same sentence,
for contrasting effect); chiasmus ( the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to
each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display
inverted parallelism, e.g. ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for you
country); anaphora; antanaclasis (the stylistic scheme of repeating a single word or phrase, but with a
different meaning); anthypophora (a figure of speech in which the speaker poses a question and then
answers the question); aposiopesis (a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off
and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination, giving an impression of
unwillingness or inability to continue.[1] An example would be the threat "Get out, or else!" );
apostrophe; auxesis (a form of hyperbole that intentionally overstates something or implies that it is
greater in significance or size than it really is); bathos (an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to
the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect, e.g. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way
that bricks don't); climax; ekphrasis; epistrophe (the repetition of the same word or words at the end
of successive phrases, clauses or sentences); epizeuxis (the repetition of a word or phrase in
immediate succession, for vehemence or emphasis); hyperbaton (A figure of speech that uses
deviation from normal or logical word order to produce an effect); hyperbole; paralipsis (the speaker
or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up); ellipsis;
parison (corresponding structure in a series of phrases or clauses--adjective to adjective, noun to noun,
etc); periphrasis (The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name); ploche
(repetition with variations); polyptoton (the stylistic scheme in which words derived from the same
root are repeated, e.g. "strong" and "strength"); polysyndeton (the use of several conjunctions in close
succession, especially where some could otherwise be omitted); prosopopoeia (an imaginary or absent
person is represented as speaking or acting); zeugma (one single phrase or word joins different parts
of a sentence); simile; metonymy (a word or phrase that is used to stand in for another word); (dead)
metaphor (a metaphor which has lost the original imagery of its meaning owing to extensive,
repetitive popular usage).