Rhetorical Devices
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50 free Rhetorical Devices trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every memorable speech is built from a small kit of tricks. A phrase is repeated until it lands, two opposites are set side by side, a question is asked that nobody is expected to answer. Greek and Roman teachers gave each trick a name more than two thousand years ago, and English classes still use those names today. This quiz gives you an example or a clue and asks you to name the device. It covers the terms most often tested in high school and AP English Language courses, from the sound effects and exaggerations everyone learns first to the schemes of repetition and word order with harder Greek names. Other questions cover the classical appeals, a few common fallacies, and the speakers and writers whose lines became the textbook examples. The early questions suit a first unit on rhetoric; the later ones will stretch a debater or a keen reader. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the set works as a study check before a test, as a printable multiple-choice worksheet with answers, or as a quick game for anyone who likes knowing what a trick is called.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Greek city-state, whose people were famed for pithy replies, gave English the word 'laconic'?
Sparta
Sparta lies in Laconia, the region behind the word. When a Macedonian king warned what he would do if he invaded, the Spartans are said to have sent back a single word: 'If.'
Q 02Which device, Greek for 'sharp-dull', does Romeo pile up in cries like 'O brawling love! O loving hate!'?
Oxymoron
Oxymoron joins two contradictory terms, and Romeo strings thirteen in a row in Romeo and Juliet. The word practises what it names, since its two halves mean keen and foolish.
Q 03Which term for a distraction comes from a pungent lure William Cobbett said could pull hounds off a scent?
Red herring
Red herring is a strongly smoked kipper, and in 1807 William Cobbett told of using one to draw hounds away from their quarry. The story was probably invented, but the phrase stuck.
Q 04Which Athenian orator is said to have cured a stammer by rehearsing speeches with pebbles in his mouth?
Demosthenes
Demosthenes also strengthened his voice by speaking on the seashore over the roar of the waves. Or so the ancient lives say, and Plutarch adds that his pronunciation had been inarticulate and stammering.
Q 05Which device, Greek for 'name-making', gave the cuckoo, the chickadee and the whip-poor-will their names?
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia builds a word from the sound it describes, which is why so many birds are simply named after their calls. The cuckoo's two-note call gave it echoing names in French (coucou), German (Kuckuck) and Latin (cuculus) too.
Q 06Which US president's inaugural antimetabole urged Americans to ask what they could do for their country?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy swapped 'your country' and 'you' around in back-to-back clauses in 1961. Antimetabole takes its name from Greek words for turning about in the opposite direction.
Q 07Which storytelling device, Greek for 'unpublished', is named after Procopius's Secret History of Byzantine court life?
Anecdote
Anecdote began as Anekdota, the title of Procopius's collection of short incidents from the private life of the Byzantine court. The word now covers any brief story told to make a point.
Q 08Which device do American tall tales rely on to establish the giant stature and abilities of Paul Bunyan?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole comes from Greek words for 'beyond' and 'throw', and nobody is meant to take it literally. In everyday speech it is the heavy bag that 'weighed a ton'.
Q 09Which satirist's A Modest Proposal argues, straight-faced, that Ireland's poor should sell their children as food?
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift published the essay in 1729, complete with cooking methods and sums showing the profit. Its deadpan tone made 'a modest proposal' a lasting label for satire of this kind.
Q 10Which device, from the Latin for 'letter', drives the tongue-twister 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers'?
Alliteration
Alliteration was coined in a Latin dialogue by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Long before it had a name, it held together Old English poems such as Beowulf.
Q 11Which Greek philosopher's Rhetoric defines the art as seeing the available means of persuasion in each case?
Aristotle
Aristotle spread the Rhetoric over three books and opened it by calling rhetoric a counterpart of dialectic. Both, he argued, deal in probability and so suit human affairs.
Q 12Which device is named after the eiron, a stock character of Greek comedy who pretends to know less than he does?
Irony
Irony comes from the Greek eironeia, at first a word for lying. Socrates' habit of feigning ignorance in debate turned it into a pretence the listener is meant to see through.
Q 13Which Shakespeare character turns a Roman crowd against Brutus while repeatedly calling him 'an honourable man'?
Mark Antony
Q 21Which fallacy, often mistaken for a simple insult, attacks whoever makes an argument instead of the argument itself?
Ad hominem
Ad hominem is short for a Latin phrase meaning 'argument directed at the person'. The word 'hominem' covers anyone, though some writers have used 'ad feminam' when the target is a woman.
Q 22Which extended device shapes John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, whose hero Christian walks to the Celestial City?
Allegory
Allegory comes from Greek words meaning 'speaking about something else'. Bunyan began the book in a Bedfordshire prison, jailed for holding religious services outside the Church of England.
Q 23Which quality of words makes 'pig-headed' an insult and 'strong-willed' a compliment for the same stubborn person?
Connotation
Mark Antony had been allowed to speak at the funeral only if he did not blame the conspirators. So he praises them as honourable men again and again until the sarcasm is unmistakable.
Q 14Which device ties Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' to the Emancipation Proclamation and the US Constitution?
Allusion
Allusion is a passing reference that only works if the audience catches it. King shaped the whole speech as a homage to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a century after emancipation.
Q 15Which classical appeal, from a Greek word for 'suffering', works on an audience's emotions rather than its reason?
Pathos
Pathos shares its root with sympathy, empathy and pathetic. A speaker who uses it is drawing out feelings the audience already holds, not planting new ones.
Q 16Which classical appeal, from the Greek for 'character', persuades through the speaker's own credibility?
Ethos
Ethos is the root of ethikos, the Greek word for showing moral character. A speaker earns it through three things: practical wisdom, virtue and goodwill towards the audience.
Q 17Which classical appeal, from the Greek for 'word' or 'reason', persuades with facts, figures and sound argument?
Logos
Logos could mean word, speech, account or judgment in Greek, and New Testament writers later used it for the divine Word. In persuasion it asks listeners to follow the argument, not the speaker.
Q 18Which device, Greek for 'carrying back', opens A Tale of Two Cities with clause after clause starting 'it was'?
Anaphora
Anaphora repeats the same words at the start of neighbouring clauses to build rhythm and emphasis. Martin Luther King Jr. used it too, returning to the title phrase of 'I Have a Dream' eight times.
Q 19Which device, Greek for 'setting opposite', powers Patrick Henry's cry 'Give me liberty or give me death!'?
Antithesis
Antithesis sets two opposites side by side in matching grammar so that each sharpens the other. A proverb manages it in four words: 'Man proposes, God disposes.'
Q 20Which fallacy, called an Aunt Sally in Britain after a pub game, attacks a distorted version of an opponent's argument?
Straw man
Straw man suggests a figure that is easy to knock down, such as a scarecrow or a military training dummy. The arguer flattens that stand-in and then claims to have beaten the real position.
Connotation is the emotional or cultural association a word carries on top of its literal meaning. Both labels describe someone stubborn, but one signals admiration and the other frustration.
Q 24Which device is Oscar Wilde using when a character claims he can resist anything except temptation?
Paradox
Paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself yet makes a point once it is unpicked. G. K. Chesterton was another master of it, observing that spies do not look like spies.
Q 25Which device, Greek for 'a turning back', inverts normal word order the way Yoda does throughout the Star Wars films?
Anastrophe
Anastrophe moves a word out of its usual place for emphasis, as when Yoda puts the object first and the verb last. Latin poets leaned on it, and Virgil uses it in the first line of the Aeneid.
Q 26Which abolitionist's speech at a women's convention in Akron, Ohio, is known by a repeated rhetorical question?
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth gave the speech without a title in 1851. The famous question, 'Ain't I a Woman?', comes from a very different version published in 1863 and is missing from the earliest transcript.
Q 27Which Roman orator lamented 'O tempora, o mores!' in a speech exposing Catiline's plot to overthrow the republic?
Cicero
Cicero used the cry, meaning 'Oh the times, oh the customs', in four surviving speeches. The best known opens his first attack on Catiline, delivered to the conspirator's face before the Senate.
Q 28Which device, Greek for 'a change of name', lets 'the crown' stand for a monarchy and 'the press' for journalists?
Metonymy
Metonymy names a thing by something closely tied to it. Monarchs really do wear crowns, so the link already exists, whereas a metaphor borrows its comparison from an unrelated field.
Q 29Which device lets a part name the whole, as when soldiers become 'boots' and business executives become 'suits'?
Synecdoche
Synecdoche also runs the other way, with the whole standing for a part. The two directions go by the Latin names pars pro toto and totum pro parte.
Q 30Which device has Abraham Lincoln finish three phrases in a row with 'the people' in the Gettysburg Address?
Epistrophe
Epistrophe, from a Greek word for 'return', repeats the same words at the end of successive clauses. Its mirror image repeats them at the start, and a speaker who does both is using symploce.