Figures of Speech
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Figures of Speech trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nobody takes language literally all day. We say one thing and mean another, compare what cannot really be compared, shrink disasters and inflate small annoyances, and repeat ourselves on purpose because it sounds good. Rhetoricians have been naming these habits for more than two thousand years, and their labels are still the fastest way to explain why a line sticks in the memory. This quiz asks you to identify the figure of speech behind well-known lines from Shakespeare, great speeches, sitcoms, pop songs and everyday talk, and to match the terms to their origins. It covers the twenty or so figures usually taught in school, including simile, irony, paradox and assonance, then moves on to the stranger names from the classical handbooks. The early questions suit a middle or high school English class; the later ones will stretch a keen reader or a pub quiz regular. Every answer comes with a short explanation and an example, so the set works for revision, as a printable multiple choice worksheet, or simply for the pleasure of finally learning what that trick is called.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which figure of speech takes its name from a Greek verb that literally means to strip off the flesh?
Sarcasm
Sarcasm comes from the Greek sarkazein, to strip off the flesh as dogs do, which came to mean sneering. English borrowed the word in the 1570s in its Latin form, sarcasmus.
Q 02Which Canadian singer's hit 'Ironic' set off a long debate over whether its unlucky scenes are irony at all?
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette later said she and co-writer Glen Ballard never checked that every line was technically ironic. Comedian Ed Byrne joked that the only ironic thing about the song is its title.
Q 03Which figure of speech has a Greek name meaning 'sharp-dull', so that the word itself is an example of the device?
Oxymoron
Oxymoron joins the Greek oxys, sharp, and moros, dull or foolish, so the term contradicts itself just as 'bittersweet' and 'jumbo shrimp' do.
Q 04Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech in As You Like It is a much-cited example of which figure of speech?
Metaphor
Metaphor is itself one: the word comes from a Greek term for carrying something across. The speech goes on to call men and women 'merely players' with their exits and entrances.
Q 05Which figure of speech flashed on screen as 'Pow!' and 'Biff!' during fight scenes in the 1960s Batman TV series?
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia means 'name-making' in Greek, and covers words such as bang, beep and zoom that imitate the sounds they name. Cartoonist Roy Crane pioneered such sound effects in comics.
Q 06Which Madonna hit, also the title track of one of her albums, has a simile for its title?
Like a Virgin
Like a Virgin is a simile because it compares using the word 'like' instead of calling one thing another. The term comes from the Latin similis, meaning similar.
Q 07Which literary device turns the United States into Uncle Sam, England into John Bull and France into Marianne?
Personification
Personification gives a nation, a season or an idea a human face. John Bull began as a character in a 1712 satire by John Arbuthnot before political cartoonists made him famous.
Q 08Which figure of speech did a British Airways pilot use by announcing 'a small problem' after all four engines failed?
Understatement
Understatement made Captain Eric Moody's 1982 announcement famous: volcanic ash had stopped the engines of his Boeing 747, and he signed off, 'I trust you are not in too much distress.'
Q 09Which verbal blunder is named after an Oxford don said to have toasted 'our queer old dean' in front of Queen Victoria?
Spoonerism
Spoonerism honours William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford, who was allegedly prone to swapping the opening sounds of words. 'The Lord is a shoving leopard' is also pinned on him.
Q 10Which figure of speech, from Greek words for 'throwing beyond', is at work when someone says 'the bag weighed a ton'?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is exaggeration for effect, never meant to be taken literally. American tall tales lean on it to inflate the feats of the lumberjack Paul Bunyan.
Q 11Which figure of speech, named from the Latin for 'letter', runs through 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers'?
Alliteration
Alliteration was coined in the 15th century by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano, who built it on the Latin littera. It repeats the opening sound of neighbouring words.
Q 12Which term describes a phrase like 'kick the bucket', which becomes 'kick the calendar' in Polish?
Idiom
Idiom is the word for a phrase whose meaning cannot be read off its parts, so translators swap in a local one: the French 'break one's pipe' and Italians 'pull the leathers' when they die.
Q 13In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio's promise that tomorrow he will be 'a grave man' is which figure of speech?
Pun
Q 21Which term, from Greek words for 'the same' and 'saying', covers phrases such as 'free gift' and 'PIN number'?
Tautology
Tautology says one thing twice: a gift is free by definition, and the N in PIN already stands for number. Saying 'free gift' anyway can stress that there are no strings attached.
Q 22Which error is named after a Sheridan character who says 'she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile'?
Malapropism
Malapropism comes from Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (1775), who meant 'alligator'. Sheridan built her name on the French mal à propos, 'poorly placed'.
Q 23Patrick Henry's cry 'Give me liberty or give me death!' at the Second Virginia Convention is a model of which device?
Antithesis
Pun is the plain word for what rhetoricians call paronomasia: 'grave' means both serious and bound for the tomb. Shakespeare is estimated to have worked more than 3,000 of them into his plays.
Q 14Which figure of speech, named from the Greek for 'words of good omen', turns 'firing you' into 'letting you go'?
Euphemism
Euphemism swaps a blunt word for a gentler one, most often around death, sex and bodily functions. Minced oaths such as 'darn' and 'oh my gosh' are the swearing version.
Q 15Shylock's 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' in The Merchant of Venice is a famous example of which device?
Rhetorical question
Rhetorical question is the name for a question asked to make a point, not to get a reply. Shylock piles up several, among them 'If you poison us, do we not die?'
Q 16Robert Burns opens a famous song with the simile that his love is like which 'red, red' flower, newly sprung in June?
Rose
Rose is the flower: 'My luve's like a red, red rose, that's newly sprung in June.' Burns adds a second simile straight away, likening her to a melody 'sweetly play'd in tune'.
Q 17Which Star Wars character's speech is a popular example of anastrophe, the inversion of normal word order?
Yoda
Yoda flips his sentences, as in 'Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.' Anastrophe comes from a Greek word for a turning back.
Q 18Which Roman general's boast 'Veni, vidi, vici' is a famous asyndeton, a list with its conjunctions left out?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar reported a quick win over Pharnaces II of Pontus in three words meaning 'I came, I saw, I conquered'. Leaving out every 'and' hurries the rhythm.
Q 19Which Joseph Heller novel gave English a name for a no-win paradox created by contradictory rules?
Catch-22
Catch-22 is the rule that traps Heller's wartime pilots: asking to be grounded for insanity proves a man sane enough to keep flying. The army surgeon Doc Daneeka explains it.
Q 20Which author's essay 'Politics and the English Language' bans any figure of speech writers are used to seeing in print?
George Orwell
George Orwell made it the first of his six rules for clear writing in 1946, singling out stale phrases such as 'Achilles' heel', 'swan song' and 'hotbed'.
Antithesis balances opposites in matching phrases, here liberty against death. The opening of A Tale of Two Cities, 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times', works the same way.
Q 24Which sitcom is known for extended similes such as 'as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning'?
Blackadder
Blackadder usually gives these put-downs to its title character, here mocking yet another plan from his servant Baldrick. British comedy has long favoured the negative simile, as in 'daft as a brush'.
Q 25Which French phrase for a remark with a risqué second meaning has not been used in French itself for centuries?
Double entendre
Double entendre once meant 'double meaning' in French, but modern French would find the phrase ungrammatical. It took on its suggestive English sense after John Dryden used it in 1673.
Q 26Which term names a descriptive tag like 'the Great' in Alexander the Great or 'the Lionheart' in Richard the Lionheart?
Epithet
Epithet covers royal bynames and Homer's stock phrases alike. When James Joyce wrote of 'the snot-green sea', he was playing on Homer's familiar 'wine-dark sea'.
Q 27Which figure of speech lets 'Hollywood' stand for American filmmaking and 'the crown' for a monarchy?
Metonymy
Metonymy names a thing by something closely linked to it. Perhaps the oldest example is 'Pharaoh', which meant the Egyptian king's residence before it came to mean the king himself.
Q 28Which figure of speech, named like a punctuation mark, is Juliet using when she addresses a weapon as 'O happy dagger!'?
Apostrophe
Apostrophe turns away from the audience to address someone absent or something that cannot answer, often opening with 'O'. St Paul does the same in 'O death, where is thy sting?'
Q 29Which device, from the Greek for 'carrying back', did Martin Luther King Jr. use by repeating 'I have a dream'?
Anaphora
Anaphora repeats words at the start of neighbouring clauses, and King returned to the phrase eight times in the speech. Orators favour the device because it stirs an audience's emotions.
Q 30Which figure of speech gives a Charlie Kaufman film its title, a play on the New York city of Schenectady?
Synecdoche
Synecdoche lets a part stand for the whole, as in 'suits' for businessmen, 'wheels' for a car and 'boots' for soldiers. Much of Kaufman's 2008 film is set in Schenectady.