English II
Review of Literary Terms 1-50
Directions: Number a piece of paper from one to fifty. Beside each number,
write the term whose definition is given. A term will only be used one time, but
all terms will be used.
1. a brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or fictitious, or to a
work of art.
2. a brief saying embodying a moral, a concise statement of a principle or
precept given in pointed words.
3. a broad statement or belief based on a limited number of facts, examples,
or statistics.
4. a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negation of
its opposite
5. a form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a
narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative
itself.
6. a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted
by the words used.
7. a kind of truth that at first seems contradictory.
8. a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation,
grammar, or vocabulary, especially a variety of speech differing from the
standard literary language or speech pattern of the culture in which it
exists.
9. a repetition of consonants, especially those after a stressed vowel (eg,
march, lurch)
10. a sequence of events arranged in the order in which they occurred
11. a sermon or a tedious moralizing lecture or admonition
12. a short account of an incident
13. a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to
itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual
meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on.
14. a statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it
15. a type of rhetoric in which the second part is syntactically balanced
against the first
16. a word having a meaning opposite to that of another word.
17. a word that imitates the sound it represents.
18. additional, suggested meaning of a word as opposed to its literal, direct
meaning
19. an absent person, an abstract concept, or an important object is directly
addressed.
20. an elaborate, usually intellectually ingenious, poetic comparison or
image,
21. an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a
particular author in a ridiculous manner
22. any poetic reference to the five senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, and
taste).
23. appealing to personal interests, prejudices, or emotions rather than to
reason
24. comparable
25. comparison of two unlike things using the verb "to be" and not using like
or as in a simile
26. descended from or related to a common ancestor. (Said of words or
languages: derived from the same original form.)
27. exaggeration or overstatement.
28. expressing a command or plea
29. language that describes specific, generally observable, persons, places, or
things; in contrast to abstract language
30. language that does not exaggerate or embellish the subject matter and
uses no tools of figurative language
31. language that is used or understood only by a select group of people
32. language that refers to things that are intangible
33. ranking events or items in the order of their significance
34. substitution of a word for another word closely associated with it.
35. the comparison of two pairs that have the same relationship
36. the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several
successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs.
37. the literal, dictionary definition of a word
38. the omission of a conjunction from a list
39. the omission of a word or phrase necessary for a complete syntactical
construction but not necessary for understanding
40. the process of drawing a conclusion from given evidence
41. the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words.
42. the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of nearby words
43. the representation of something as existing or happening at other than
its proper or historical time
44. the selection and arrangement of words in a literary work
45. the significance of a story or event
46. the substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or
blunt one
47. the use of words out of their normal order.
48. the use of words, phrases, symbols, and ideas in such a way as to evoke
mental images and sense impressions by using words in a nonliteral
way, giving them a meaning beyond their ordinary one
49. two contradictory words used together.
50. words or phrases which have strong emotional overtones or connotations
and which evoke strongly positive (or negative) reactions far beyond the
specific meaning of the word which is listed in the dictionary