Trope

Linguistic usage

A trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e. using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form. The other major category of figures of speech is the scheme, which involves changing the pattern of words in a sentence.

Related Topics:
Rhetorical - Figure of speech

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Trope comes from the Greek word, tropos, which means a "turn", as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.

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A large number of tropes have been identified, among them:

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• metonymy as in association.
• irony as in contraries.
• metaphor as in comparatives.
• synecdoche as in the distribution of the whole into the part.

(For a more comprehensive listing, see Figure of speech)

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