50 Fun Facts About Literary Devices

Which figure of speech, from Greek words for 'sharp' and 'dull', covers phrases like 'jumbo shrimp' and 'bittersweet'?

Oxymoron is itself an example of one: its Greek halves pair 'sharp' with 'dull' or 'foolish'. Romeo reels off about a dozen in a single speech in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

The tongue twister about Peter Piper picking a peck of pickled peppers is a familiar example of which sound device?

Alliteration got its name in the 15th century from the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano, who built it on the Latin littera, 'letter of the alphabet'. The Peter Piper rhyme was published by 1813.

Robert Burns sings that his love is 'like a red, red rose' in a Scots song, using which figure of speech?

Simile comes from the Latin word similis, meaning 'like'. Burns based the 1794 song on traditional sources, and it is often published as a poem.

Jaques declares in Shakespeare's As You Like It that all the world is a stage, a famous example of which device?

Metaphor is itself a metaphor: the word comes from a Greek term for 'transference', as if a meaning were being carried over from one thing to another.

Tall tales about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan rely on which figure of speech, from Greek for 'throw beyond'?

Hyperbole has a modern champion in the word 'literally': dictionaries now record its use as an intensifier in statements that are not literally true.

Emily Dickinson uses which device when she casts Death as a gentleman caller who takes her for a carriage ride?

Personification of Death as a polite caller is the poem's best-known feature, yet Dickinson never saw it published: it appeared posthumously in 1890 under the title 'The Chariot'.

Dying in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio jokes that tomorrow he will be 'a grave man', an example of what?

A pun was Shakespeare's great weakness, in Samuel Johnson's view: he called a quibble 'the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world'. Not even a death scene was safe.

Lewis Carroll borrowed the name of a two-part travelling case for which kind of blended word, like 'smog' or 'brunch'?

Portmanteau words got their name in Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll's own coinage 'slithy', from the poem 'Jabberwocky', packs 'slimy' and 'lithe' into one word.

Calling a toilet a 'restroom' or 'powder room' is an example of which device, from Greek for 'words of good omen'?

Euphemism wears out fast: 'lavatory' and 'toilet' were once polite substitutes themselves, a cycle that Steven Pinker named the euphemism treadmill.

Charles Dickens kept readers of his serial novels desperate for the next instalment by ending episodes on which device?

Cliffhanger endings became a staple of Victorian serials after Dickens, but the word arrived only in the 1930s, coined for film serials whose episodes each ended in peril.

Words such as 'oink', 'meow' and 'beep' belong to which device, named from Greek for 'name-making'?

Onomatopoeia fades with time: 'fanfare', 'pigeon' and 'cough' probably began as imitations of sounds, though modern speakers no longer hear the echo.

'Spill the beans', 'break a leg' and 'raining cats and dogs' are well-known English examples of which kind of phrase?

Idiom rarely survives translation: the Polish way to say 'kick the bucket' is 'kick the calendar', while the French 'break their pipe'.

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal suggests the Irish poor sell their children as food, a savage example of what?

Satire this deadpan needed a straight face: Swift's narrator calmly notes that a well-nursed child of a year old could be stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.

Plato's tale of prisoners chained in a cave, taking shadows for reality, is among the best-known examples of what?

Allegory literally means 'speaking about something else' in Greek. Plato's is about a philosopher who finds greater knowledge outside the cave and tries to share it.

Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' speech, spoken as if alone on stage, is a notable example of which theatrical device?

Soliloquy joins the Latin solus, 'alone', and loqui, 'to speak'. Saint Augustine used the Latin word around 386 for a book of spiritual meditations.

Sophocles lets the audience of Oedipus Rex know the king's fate long before Oedipus grasps it, using which device?

Dramatic irony drives the plot: Oedipus ignores the prophet Tiresias and presses on with the hunt for King Laius's killer, never suspecting that he is the man he seeks.

The green light on Daisy's dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a much-discussed example of which device?

Symbolism here is usually read as Gatsby's unreachable goal of winning Daisy and, with her, the American Dream. Nick sees him standing alone on his lawn, staring at it across the bay.

Orson Welles tells most of Citizen Kane after its hero's death, through a reporter's interviews, using which device?

Flashback, formally called analepsis, is far older than cinema: the murderer in the Arabian Nights tale 'The Three Apples' explains his crime in a series of them.

Saying that a beaten stock-market trader 'met his Waterloo', with no further explanation, is an example of which device?

Allusion comes from the Latin alludere, 'to play' or 'to jest'. It only works on an audience that already knows the reference, which makes it a quiet test of shared culture.

The speech by Sojourner Truth known as 'Ain't I a Woman' takes its title from a famous example of which device?

Rhetorical question was also Mark Antony's weapon in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: he reminds the crowd that Caesar refused a crown three times, then asks whether that was ambition.

Oscar Wilde's much-quoted line 'I can resist anything except temptation' is an example of which figure of speech?

Paradox of this verbal kind was a trademark of Wilde and of G. K. Chesterton, who observed that 'spies do not look like spies'. Shakespeare's Polonius finds method in Hamlet's madness.

The proverb 'Man proposes, God disposes' and Dickens's 'best of times, worst of times' opening both use which device?

Antithesis is Greek for 'setting opposite'. Dickens keeps it up for a whole paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, moving on to wisdom and foolishness, Light and Darkness, hope and despair.

Martin Luther King Jr. repeated the phrase 'I have a dream' eight times in his best-known speech, using which device?

Anaphora is Greek for 'carrying back'. Besides adding emphasis, starting sentence after sentence the same way gives a speech rhythm and makes it easier to remember.

Miguel de Cervantes mocks old tales of knights errant throughout Don Quixote, making it a famous example of what?

Parody can outlive its target: Don Quixote is far better known than Amadis de Gaula, the romance of chivalry that inspired it.

Dogberry says his watch has 'comprehended two auspicious persons' in Much Ado About Nothing, making which verbal slip?

Malapropism is named after Mrs. Malaprop of Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, who praises one man as 'the very pineapple of politeness'. Dogberry meant 'apprehended two suspicious persons'.

Which verbal slip is named after an Oxford don said to have announced the hymn 'Kinkering Kongs their Titles Take'?

Spoonerism honours the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College, though most of the slips credited to him are apocryphal. He meant 'Conquering Kings'.

'The Great' in Alexander the Great and 'the Lionheart' in Richard the Lionheart are examples of which naming device?

Epithet is a hallmark of Homer, whose 'wine-dark sea' James Joyce twisted into 'the snot-green sea'. Rulers needed them too, to tell Charles the Fat from Charles the Bald.

William Shakespeare repeats images of blood and water throughout the tragedy Macbeth, an example of which device?

Motif need not be an image: Kurt Vonnegut used repeated elements to connect moments of Slaughterhouse-Five that would otherwise seem separated by time and space.

Saying 'not bad' to mean 'excellent' is which figure of speech, a hallmark of Old English poetry and Icelandic sagas?

Litotes comes from a Greek word meaning 'simplicity', yet its effect is often to exaggerate: listeners fill in for themselves what was left unsaid.

Which French-sounding term for a phrase with a risqué second meaning has not actually been used in France for centuries?

Double entendre took on its suggestive twist in English after John Dryden used it in 1673. Modern French has no exact equivalent, and the phrase would be ungrammatical there.

Calling soldiers 'boots' and a car 'wheels' uses which figure of speech, from Greek for 'simultaneous understanding'?

Synecdoche can run either way: a part may name the whole, as with 'boots on the ground', or the whole may stand for a part. Advertisers who talk of 'getting eyeballs' are using it too.

Using 'the crown' for a monarch and 'the press' for reporters are common examples of which figure of speech?

Metonymy is Greek for 'a change of name'. Capital cities are favourite examples: 'Washington' and 'Westminster' routinely stand in for whole governments.

Saint Paul uses which device, sharing its name with a punctuation mark, when he asks Death itself where its sting is?

Apostrophe in English verse and drama is often signalled by the exclamation 'O', as when Walter Raleigh hails 'eloquent, just, and mighty Death'. The one addressed can never answer back.

Charles Dickens sends Miss Bolo home 'in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' in The Pickwick Papers, using which device?

Zeugma is Greek for 'a yoking together': one word, here the little 'in', is harnessed to two others that take it in quite different senses.

Julius Caesar's boast 'I came, I saw, I conquered' drops every 'and' between its clauses, a famous case of which device?

Asyndeton comes from the Greek for 'unconnected'. Writers often leave the conjunctions out to hasten the rhythm, which suits a general reporting a swift victory.

Euripides rescues Medea at the end of her tragedy in a dragon-drawn chariot, a much-cited example of which plot device?

Deus ex machina means 'god from the machine': Greek actors playing gods were lowered on stage by a crane, and Euripides ended about half of his surviving plays this way.

Dan Brown named Bishop Aringarosa in The Da Vinci Code after a loose Italian version of which mystery-writing device?

Red herring is exactly what the bishop is: for most of the novel he seems to be at the centre of the church's conspiracies, then turns out to have been innocently duped.

Alfred Hitchcock popularised which term for a plot-driving object, such as the statuette in The Maltese Falcon?

MacGuffin was coined by the English screenwriter Angus MacPhail, who wrote several screenplays for Hitchcock. The Holy Grail of Arthurian legend has been cited as an early example.

Which Russian playwright advised that a rifle seen in the first act must go off in the second or third?

Anton Chekhov repeated the advice in several letters to young playwrights: every element of a play should be necessary, and anything that will not be used should be removed.

Which Latin phrase did the poet Horace use for epics that, like Homer's Iliad, open in the thick of the Trojan War?

In medias res means 'into the middle of things'. Horace set it against starting 'from the egg', meaning the one laid by Leda, from which Helen of Troy was born.

The pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales and Scheherazade's nights with the sultan each serve as which narrative device?

Frame story collections spread west over the centuries. In Chaucer's, each pilgrim tells his own kind of tale, and the frame itself was once the most admired part of his work.

Which style, named with a phrase credited to psychologist William James, did James Joyce use for Molly Bloom in Ulysses?

Stream of consciousness was first applied to fiction by May Sinclair in 1918, writing about Dorothy Richardson's novels. Richardson herself thought the label lamentably ill-chosen.

Which term did the Victorian critic John Ruskin coin for poetry in which clouds seem sullen and leaves dance?

Pathetic fallacy was meant as a criticism: Ruskin coined it to attack the sentimentality of poets such as Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. To him 'pathetic' simply meant 'emotional'.

Which term for a contrasting character, like Draco Malfoy beside Harry Potter, comes from the practice of backing gems?

Foil was once laid behind gems to make them shine more brightly. Before they fence, Hamlet tells Laertes 'I'll be your foil', a piece of wordplay on the contrast between the two men.

James Joyce borrowed which Christian term for the sudden moments of insight that his characters experience?

Epiphany first appears in this sense in Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Critics later found the same flashes in Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust.

A striking clock and Elizabethan doublets in the ancient Rome of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar are examples of what?

Anachronism joins the Greek ana, 'against', and khronos, 'time'. Brutus even draws attention to the slip, remarking on the chimes with the words 'Count the clock'.

The Beowulf poet calls the sea the 'whale's road', a compressed poetic phrase of which Old English and Old Norse type?

Kenning is taken straight from Old Norse, where the related verb kenna means 'to know'. Old English verse also calls the sea the 'swan's road' and the 'sail-road'.

Ferris Bueller shooing audiences home after the credits of Ferris Bueller's Day Off breaks which stage convention?

The fourth wall is often traced to Denis Diderot, who told actors in 1758 to imagine a huge barrier across the front of the stage and behave as if the curtain had never risen.

Bram Stoker tells Dracula through letters, diary entries and newspaper articles, a form of novel known by which name?

Epistolary comes from the Greek word for a letter. Stoker always intended to write the tale this way, though he first set it in Styria rather than Transylvania.

Which colour names overly ornate prose, after the gleaming patches the Roman poet Horace criticised in his Ars Poetica?

Purple passages that stand out from the rest of a work are known as purple patches, Horace's own image. He pictured them tacked on to weighty openings where they had no place.