The Top 20 Figures of Speech:
Alliteration = Repetition of an initial consonant sound.
You'll never put a better bit of butter on your knife
(Country Life Butter)
The daily diary of the American dream
(Wall Street Journal)
Functional... Fashionable... Formidable...
(Fila)
Greyhound going great
(Greyhound)
Don't dream it. Drive it.
(Jaguar)
The best four by four by far
(Land Rover)
Welcome to the World Wide Wow
(AOL)
Made to make your mouth water
(Opal Fruits)
Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Severus Snape, Minerva McGonagall, Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor; also Coca-Cola, Dunkin' Donut, Paypal
Anaphora = Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses, e.g.:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted."
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, We shall fight on the seas and oceans, We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, We shall fight on the beaches, We shall fight on the landing grounds, We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” (Winston Churchill during the Second World War)
Antithesis = The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases, e.g.:
To err is human, to forgive, divine (A. Pope)
Too black for heav'n, and yet too white for hell (J. Dryden)
Man proposes, God disposes.
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing. (Goethe)
Apostrophe = Breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character.
Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee! I have thee not, and yet I see thee still." (from Macbeth)
Assonance = Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighbouring words.
Chiasmus = A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed, e.g.:
I lead the life I love; I love the life I lead
Euphemism = The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit, e.g. to use
“pass away” instead of “die”
Hyperbole = An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
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.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."
Litotes = A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.
"The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace." (A. Marvell)
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.
the Stage = the theatrical profession;
the Crown = the monarchy;
the Bench = the judiciary;
Shakespeare = (all of) his works;
Onomatopoeia = The formation or use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
Cock-a-doodle-do, crowed the rooster.
The clock goes ticktock.
The cow says moo all day long.
Oxymoron = A figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side.
hot ice,
loud silence
sophisticated rednecks
Paradox = A statement that appears to contradict itself.
“War is peace."
"Freedom is slavery."
"Ignorance is strength."
(from: George Orwell)
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.
Homographic puns are puns which exploit the difference in meanings of words which look alike (and usually sound alike). E.g.: "Being in politics is just like playing golf: you are trapped in one bad lie after another." (Pun on the two meanings of lie - "a deliberate untruth"/"the position in which something rests").
Homophonic puns are puns which exploit the difference in meanings of words which sound alike but have different spellings. E.g.: "I've no idea how worms reproduce but you often find hem in /pers/." (Pun on the identical pronunciation of "pears" and "pairs").
Simile = A stated comparison (usually formed with "like" or "as") between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."
(W.H. Auden)
Solecism = a deviation from conventional usage in grammar, syntax or pronunciation, e.g.:
`I ain't done nothing'
`You didn't ought to do it'
Synecdoche = A figure of speech is which a part is used to represent the whole, the whole for a part, the specific for the general, the general for the specific, or the material for the thing made from it.
Give us this day our daily bread
The police are investigating the case
Synaesthesia = the mixing of sensations; the concurrent appeal to more than one sense, the response through several senses to the stimulation of one, e.g.:
`a cold eye'
`a soft wind'
`a heavy silence'
`a hard voice'
Understatement = A figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.
a little on the old side'