English Vocabulary 23
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48 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Allegory | an obviously symbolic story |
| Alliteration | repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words. |
| Allusion | reference to something people should know |
| Ambiguity | More than 1 meaning |
| Apostrophe | An address to either someone who is absent or something nonhuman |
| Assonance | Repetition of internal vowel sounds |
| Blank Verse | Unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| Carpe Diem | Seize to the Day |
| Cliche | An idea or expression that has become tired and trite from overuse |
| Connotation | Associations or Implications that go beyond a word's literal meaning and deriving from how the word has been commonly used and the associations people make with it. |
| Couplet | 2 consecutive lines of poetry that usually rhyme and have the same meter |
| Denotation | the dictionary meaning of the word |
| Diction | Word Choice |
| Dramatic Monologue | a type of lyric poem in which a character addresses a distinct by silent audience imagined to be present in the poem. |
| Electra Complex | Female version of the Oedipus Complex |
| Hyperbole | A boldly exaggerated statement that adds emphasis without intending to be literally true. |
| Irony | Verbal: figure of speech that occurs when a person says one thing but means the opposite. Situational: exists when there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. Cosmic: occurs when a writer uses God, destiny, or fate to dash the hopes and expectations of a character or of humankind in general. |
| Limerick | A light humorous style of fixed poetry. 5 lines with the rhyme scheme: aabba. |
| Metaphor | A comparison without using like or as. |
| Oedipus Complex | Boys unconscious rivalry with his father for his mother's love. |
| Oxymoron | 2 contradictory words are used together "jumbo shrimp" |
| Parody | A humorous imitation of another, usually serious, work. "A Very Potter Musical" |
| Persona | A mask. A speaker created by a writer to tell a story or to speak in a poem. |
| Personification | Giving human characteristics to a nonhuman being. |
| Quatrain | A 4 line stanza |
| Satire | Art of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it. "South Park" |
| Simile | A comparison using like or as. |
| Sonnet | English: 3 quatrains and a couplet, rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Italian: octave, rhyme sheme: abbaabba |
| Symbol | A person, object, an image, a word, or an event that evokes a range of additional meaning. |
| Syntax | The ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. |
| Theme | central meaning or dominant idea in a literary work. |
| Thesis | central idea of an essay |
| Tone | the author's implicit attitude toward the reader or the people, places, and events in a work as revealed by the elements of the author's style. |
| Understatement | opposite of hyperbole. |
| Villanelle | 19 line poem |
| Iambic | unstressed, stressed |
| Trochaic | stressed, unstressed |
| Anapestic | unstressed, unstressed, stressed |
| Dactylic | stressed, unstressed, unstressed |
| Spondaic | stressed, stressed |
| Monometer | 1 foot |
| Dimeter | 2 feet |
| Trimeter | 3 feet |
| Tetrameter | 4 feet |
| Pentameter | 5 feet |
| Hexameter | 6 feet |
| heptameter | 7 feet |
| octameter | 8 feet |
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