Literary Devices: The Complete Glossary

A story whose characters and events stand for a deeper moral, political or spiritual meaning.

• "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — Animal Farm, George Orwell
• "The man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world." — The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
• "How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?" — Allegory of the Cave, Plato

A direct comparison that states one thing is another, without 'like' or 'as'.

• "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." — As You Like It, Shakespeare
• "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." — Emily Dickinson
• "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas." — The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes

A comparison using 'like' or 'as'.

• "O my Luve is like a red, red rose." — Robert Burns
• "As busy as a bee." — common idiom
• "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold." — The Destruction of Sennacherib, Lord Byron

Giving human qualities to non-human things or abstract ideas.

• "Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me." — Emily Dickinson
• "The wind whispered through the trees." — common usage
• "The fog comes on little cat feet." — Fog, Carl Sandburg

Vivid sensory language that makes a scene felt through sight, sound, smell, taste or touch.

• "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." — To Autumn, John Keats
• "The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air." — Anecdote of the Jar, Wallace Stevens
• "The brine stung his split lip before he even saw the water." — original example

The repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words.

• "Hear the mellow wedding bells." — The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe
• "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." — My Fair Lady
• "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

The repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words.

• "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." — tongue twister
• "Old English poems such as Beowulf are organized around alliteration rather than rhyme: each line's stressed words share their opening sounds." — Beowulf

A word that imitates the sound it describes.

• "How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle / In the icy air of night!" — The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Hark, hark! / Bow-wow. / The watch-dogs bark! / Bow-wow." — The Tempest, William Shakespeare
• "SMASH The door was hit with such a force that it swung clean off its hinges and with a deafening crash landed flat on the floor." — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling

A narrative poem, often in quatrains with a strong rhythm, that tells a dramatic story.

• "I met a lady in the meads, / Full beautiful, a faery's child;" — La Belle Dame sans Merci, John Keats
• "Water, water, every where, / And all the boards did shrink;" — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea," — Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe

A poem whose visual shape on the page reinforces its meaning.

• "Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, / Though foolishly he lost the same," — Easter Wings, George Herbert
• "A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, / Made of a heart and cemented with tears:" — The Altar, George Herbert
• "The word 'silence' is arranged into a block with an empty space at its centre." — Silencio, Eugen Gomringer

A protagonist whose fatal flaw drives their downfall despite noble qualities.

• "His hubris drives him to hunt the killer who turns out to be himself, and he gouges out his own eyes." — Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
• "His obsessive pursuit of wealth and a lost love leads him to his death." — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "His impulsiveness leads him to marry within a day and ends in both lovers' deaths." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

Comedy built on improbable situations, mistaken identities and exaggerated physical action.

• "Two men both claim to be 'Ernest' to win their loves." — The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde
• "A disastrous play collapses backstage in real time." — Noises Off, Michael Frayn
• "She is your treasure, she must have a husband: I must dance barefoot on her wedding day." — The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare

A brief reference to a well-known person, place, event or work.

• "He was a real Romeo with the ladies." — reference to Shakespeare
• "She had the patience of Job." — biblical reference
• "The title of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men alludes to Robert Burns's line about the best-laid schemes of mice and men going astray." — Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

Deliberate exaggeration for emphasis or effect, not meant literally.

• "I've told you a million times." — common usage
• "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." — common idiom
• "I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum." — Hamlet, Shakespeare

A gap between what is said or expected and what is actually meant or happens.

• "A couple sell their most prized possessions to buy gifts that become useless." — The Gift of the Magi, O. Henry
• "The audience knows Oedipus is hunting himself." — Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
• "The fire station burned down while the crew were out at a chip-pan fire." — original example

The regular rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse.

• "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (iambic pentameter)" — Sonnet 18, Shakespeare
• "Once upon a midnight dreary (trochaic)." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Two households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene," — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

Two contradictory words placed together so their clash creates a new meaning.

• "Parting is such sweet sorrow." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "O brawling love! O loving hate!" — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "No light, but rather darkness visible." — Paradise Lost, John Milton

A statement that appears self-contradictory but contains an underlying truth.

• "I must be cruel, only to be kind." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "The Child is father of the Man." — My Heart Leaps Up, William Wordsworth
• "A pilot who asks to be grounded for insanity proves, by asking, that he is sane enough to fly." — Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Referring to something by the name of a thing closely associated with it.

• "The pen is mightier than the sword." — Richelieu, Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• "The White House announced the decision this morning." — common usage
• "The crown must answer to the people." — common usage

A figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part.

• "All hands on deck." — common usage
• "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." — Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
• "She finally bought her own set of wheels." — common usage

The use of an object, image or action to represent an idea beyond its literal meaning.

• "The green light at the end of Daisy's dock comes to stand for Gatsby's whole unreachable dream." — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "The conch shell stands for order and lawful authority, and shatters when both collapse." — Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• "The scarlet letter A is meant to mark shame, but Hester gradually remakes what it means." — The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

A fixed expression whose meaning cannot be worked out from the literal words.

• "Kick the bucket." — common idiom
• "Spill the beans." — common idiom
• "Under the weather." — common idiom

A play on words that exploits multiple meanings or similar sounds for wit.

• "Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York." — Richard III, Shakespeare
• "Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest hangs its whole plot on the pun between the name Ernest and the virtue earnest." — The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

A mild or indirect expression substituted for one considered too harsh or blunt.

• "He passed away last spring." — common usage
• "The company is letting you go." — common usage
• "Squealer announces a 'readjustment' of rations, never a reduction." — Animal Farm, George Orwell

Deliberate understatement that affirms something by negating its opposite.

• "Not bad." — common usage
• "He's no fool." — common usage
• "Old English poems such as Beowulf lean on grim understatement: a deadly battle is 'no pleasant exchange'." — Beowulf

An extended comparison that explains an unfamiliar thing in terms of a familiar one.

• "My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." — Forrest Gump
• "As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country." — Proverbs 25:25
• "Explaining the heart as a pump - valves, pressure, flow - is the standard analogy of biology teaching." — common usage

A recurring image, phrase or idea that develops a work's themes through repetition.

• "Blood recurs through Macbeth, from the first wounded captain to hands that all the ocean cannot wash clean." — Macbeth, Shakespeare
• "The phrase 'So it goes' returns after every death in the novel." — Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• "The faded eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg watch over the valley of ashes throughout the novel." — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Attributing human emotions to nature or the weather so the setting mirrors a character's feelings.

• "Lear rages on the heath while the storm rages with him." — King Lear, Shakespeare
• "The wild moorland weather of Wuthering Heights keeps pace with its characters' tempers." — Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
• "The sky had been weeping all morning, which suited everyone at the graveside." — original example

An elaborate, extended metaphor that yokes together two strikingly unlike things across a whole passage or poem.

• "Donne compares two lovers' souls to the twin legs of a drawing compass: one fixed, one roaming, always joined." — A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, John Donne
• "A flea that has bitten both lovers becomes the poem's whole case that they are already united." — The Flea, John Donne
• "Metaphysical poets like Donne and Herbert built entire poems from a single far-fetched comparison, which is why 'metaphysical conceit' names the device." — common usage

Describing one sense in terms of another - loud colours, sweet sounds, bitter cold light.

• "Dante describes reaching a place 'where the sun is silent'." — Inferno, Dante Alighieri
• "Baudelaire's Correspondances imagines perfumes 'sweet as oboes, green as meadows'." — Correspondances, Charles Baudelaire
• "The trumpet line tasted of copper and cheap sugar." — original example

Addressing an absent person, an abstract idea or a thing as if it could hear and answer.

• "O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" — 1 Corinthians 15:55
• "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, / How I wonder what you are." — The Star, Jane Taylor
• "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done." — O Captain! My Captain!, Walt Whitman

The repetition of consonant sounds in nearby words, especially at the ends of syllables.

• "And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." — God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
• "Pitter-patter." — common usage
• "...some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

The repetition of hissing 's', 'sh' and 'z' sounds for a whispering, slippery or sinister effect.

• "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past." — Sonnet 30, Shakespeare
• "Something slid past the skirting board, softly, insistently." — original example

A harsh, discordant clatter of sounds used deliberately to make a passage feel ugly or violent.

• "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!" — Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
• "Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons." — Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen
• "The skip lorry clanged, ground its gears, and juddered off through the roadworks." — original example

A smooth, musical pleasantness of sound, built from soft consonants and long vowels.

• "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees." — The Princess, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• "The lone and level sands stretch far away." — Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." — To Autumn, John Keats

The repetition of matching end sounds between words, usually at line endings.

• "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night;" — The Tyger, William Blake
• "I do not like green eggs and ham. / I do not like them, Sam-I-am." — Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss
• "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary - internal rhyme inside a single line." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

Repeating a word, phrase or structure so it gathers weight and rhythm.

• "Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!" — Break, Break, Break, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• "In his 1941 Harrow School speech, Churchill hammered a single instruction: never give in, never, never, never." — Winston Churchill, Harrow School speech, 1941
• "The phrase 'So it goes' recurs more than a hundred times." — Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

A line or phrase repeated at intervals through a poem or song, usually at the end of a stanza.

• "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'" — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Do not go gentle into that good night - repeated as the villanelle's alternating refrain." — Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas
• "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." — Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost

Repeating the same word or phrase at the start of successive clauses or lines.

• "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." — A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• "I have a dream - repeated eight times across the speech's climax." — Martin Luther King Jr., March on Washington, 1963
• "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets." — Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1940

Repeating the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses or sentences.

• "...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." — Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln
• "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child." — 1 Corinthians 13:11
• "They promised transparency. They audited transparency. They wrote seventeen memos about transparency." — original example

A mirrored structure in which the second half of a phrase reverses the order of the first (A-B-B-A).

• "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." — John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961
• "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." — Macbeth, Shakespeare
• "Plan your work and work your plan." — common usage

A question asked for effect, where the answer is obvious or supplied by the asking itself.

• "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?" — The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare
• "O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" — Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech is remembered by the question it kept returning to: Ain't I a woman?" — Sojourner Truth, 1851

Deliberately repeating conjunctions ('and... and... and') where they could be omitted.

• "And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house." — Matthew 7:27
• "Hemingway's plain style chains clauses with 'and' so that events land one after another without hierarchy." — Ernest Hemingway
• "Cormac McCarthy's sentences roll on conjunctions for pages, refusing commas and full stops their usual work." — Cormac McCarthy

Omitting conjunctions between clauses so the phrases land in quick succession.

• "I came, I saw, I conquered." — attributed to Julius Caesar
• "...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe." — John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961
• "Duty called. He shaved, dressed, left." — original example

Expressing related ideas in matching grammatical structures.

• "Easy come, easy go." — common idiom
• "Hebrew poetry, including the Psalms, is built on parallel paired lines: the second line restates, sharpens or reverses the first." — Psalms
• "Like father, like son." — common idiom

Placing two opposite ideas in balanced, parallel phrasing to sharpen the contrast.

• "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." — A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." — Neil Armstrong, 1969
• "To err is human, to forgive, divine." — An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope

Writing that uses humor, irony and exaggeration to expose and criticise folly or vice.

• "Swift's A Modest Proposal solemnly recommends selling Irish babies as food, to indict English policy in Ireland." — A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift
• "Animal Farm replays the Russian Revolution as a farmyard coup." — Animal Farm, George Orwell
• "Gulliver's Travels shrinks and enlarges humanity until its politics look as small or as monstrous as they are." — Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

Hints planted early in a story that point toward later events.

• "These violent delights have violent ends." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "My mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "The shooting of Candy's old dog rehearses the novel's ending." — Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

A scene that interrupts the present action to show events from an earlier time.

• "Odysseus spends four books recounting his voyage to the Phaeacians - the epic's famous wanderings are told in flashback." — The Odyssey, Homer
• "Gatsby's Louisville courtship of Daisy arrives in retrospect, narrated years after the fact." — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "Billy Pilgrim comes 'unstuck in time', so the war arrives in shuffled flashbacks." — Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Beginning a story in the middle of the action, with the background filled in later.

• "The Iliad opens in the ninth year of the Trojan War, mid-quarrel, not at its beginning." — The Iliad, Homer
• "The Odyssey starts with Odysseus already shipwrecked and held captive, ten years after Troy." — The Odyssey, Homer
• "Paradise Lost begins with Satan already fallen, waking in the lake of fire." — Paradise Lost, John Milton

A story that contains and presents another story or set of stories within it.

• "Scheherazade tells tale after tale to postpone her execution - the frame that holds One Thousand and One Nights together." — One Thousand and One Nights
• "A pilgrimage to Canterbury frames the pilgrims' competing tales." — The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
• "Frankenstein arrives as letters from an Arctic captain, wrapped around Victor's confession, wrapped around the creature's own account." — Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

An abrupt, improbable intervention that resolves a plot from outside its own logic.

• "Medea escapes the consequences of her revenge in a chariot sent by the sun god." — Medea, Euripides
• "A naval officer simply arrives on the beach and ends the boys' war." — Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• "The term is Latin for 'god from the machine', after the stage crane of Greek tragedy." — common usage

When the audience knows something crucial that a character does not.

• "Oedipus vows to find Laius's killer; the audience knows he is hunting himself." — Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
• "Romeo drinks the poison because he does not know what the audience knows: Juliet is alive." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "Othello keeps calling Iago 'honest' while the audience watches Iago lie." — Othello, Shakespeare

A narrator whose account the reader has reason to doubt - through madness, bias, ignorance or deceit.

• "The narrator insists on his sanity while describing the murder he committed because of an old man's eye." — The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Humbert Humbert's elegant self-defence is the novel's indictment of him." — Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• "Agatha Christie's most famous twist turns on who has been narrating all along." — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

A style that renders a character's thoughts as they occur - associative, unpunctuated, mid-flow.

• "...and yes I said yes I will Yes." — Ulysses, James Joyce
• "Mrs Dalloway follows its characters' drifting thoughts across a single London day." — Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• "The Benjy section narrates through a mind with no sense of time, and the prose obeys him." — The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

Placing two contrasting elements side by side so each sharpens the other.

• "Gatsby's glittering parties sit a short drive from the grey valley of ashes." — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "Dickens opens by setting best and worst, wisdom and foolishness, light and darkness side by side for a full paragraph." — A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• "The wedding photos hung in the hallway of the house where nobody spoke." — original example

Giving animals or objects genuinely human behaviour, speech and society within a story's reality.

• "The animals hold meetings, pass resolutions and run the farm themselves." — Animal Farm, George Orwell
• "A spider saves a pig's life by writing words into her web." — Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
• "Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad keep house, boat and motor-car along the riverbank." — The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

The emotional release an audience feels through experiencing a story's pity, fear and resolution.

• "Aristotle's Poetics defines tragedy by this effect: through pity and fear it accomplishes the purging of such emotions." — Poetics, Aristotle
• "Audiences at Romeo and Juliet weep for two fictional teenagers and feel better, not worse, for it." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "The final reconciliation of King Lear and Cordelia devastates audiences precisely to release them." — King Lear, Shakespeare

Excessive pride or self-confidence that invites downfall.

• "Oedipus is certain he can outrun the prophecy, and his certainty walks him straight into it." — Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
• "Icarus, warned twice, flies toward the sun anyway." — Greek myth
• "Victor Frankenstein assumes the right to create life and refuses every consequence of it." — Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Something placed in the wrong historical period, whether by error or by design.

• "The clock hath stricken three - a striking clock in ancient Rome, fourteen centuries early." — Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
• "A Connecticut Yankee brings nineteenth-century engineering to Camelot on purpose - the anachronism is the whole novel." — A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain
• "The Roman centurion checked his watch." — original example

A moment when a character suddenly sees their situation, or themselves, clearly.

• "Till this moment I never knew myself." — Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• "Gabriel Conroy, watching the snow fall, finally sees his marriage and his own vanity clearly." — The Dead, James Joyce
• "Joyce used the word itself for these moments of sudden revelation, and Dubliners is structured around them." — Dubliners, James Joyce

A deliberately misleading clue planted to draw the reader's suspicion in the wrong direction.

• "Severus Snape spends the first book behaving exactly like the villain, so the real one goes unnoticed." — Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J. K. Rowling
• "Christie seeds And Then There Were None with suspects who each look guilty in turn." — And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• "The locked shed everyone avoided turned out to hold nothing but the previous owner's rusted bicycles." — original example

A character whose contrasts with another highlight that character's qualities.

• "Hamlet even puns on the word to Laertes - 'I'll be your foil, Laertes' - naming the device they enact." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "Mercutio's mockery of love throws Romeo's romanticism into relief." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "Watson's solid decency measures exactly how strange Holmes is." — Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle

A universal character type, image or story pattern that recurs across cultures and eras.

• "Gandalf and Dumbledore both descend from the mentor archetype: the grey-bearded guide who dies before the final test." — common usage
• "Loki, Anansi and Br'er Rabbit are the trickster in three different mythologies." — common usage
• "Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces mapped the hero's journey pattern under a thousand surface stories." — The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

The fatal flaw or error of judgement that brings about a tragic hero's downfall.

• "Aristotle's Poetics introduced the term: the hero falls not through vice but through some error or frailty." — Poetics, Aristotle
• "Othello's hamartia is jealousy - a single exploitable flaw in a great general." — Othello, Shakespeare
• "Macbeth's is 'vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself'." — Macbeth, Shakespeare

A novel that follows a protagonist's formation from youth toward maturity.

• "Jane Eyre traces its heroine from unloved orphan to a woman who chooses her own terms." — Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• "David Copperfield follows its narrator from birth to authorship - Dickens's own favorite of his novels." — David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
• "Scout Finch narrates her own moral education across three Maycomb summers." — To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

A speech in which a character, alone on stage, speaks their thoughts aloud.

• "To be, or not to be, that is the question." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day." — Macbeth, Shakespeare
• "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? - Juliet, believing herself alone at the window." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

Informal, conversational words and phrases characteristic of everyday regional speech.

• "Huck Finn narrates his whole story in Missouri river-country vernacular, and the novel's voice is the point." — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• "Holden Caulfield's 'phony' - repeated obsessively - is a colloquialism doing a novel's worth of characterization." — The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
• "Gonna, y'all, wee, mate: each one places its speaker on a map." — common usage

The comic misuse of a word in place of a similar-sounding one.

• "He is the very pine-apple of politeness! - Mrs Malaprop, the device's namesake, meaning 'pinnacle'." — The Rivals, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
• "Comparisons are odorous - Dogberry, meaning 'odious'." — Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare
• "She described the negotiation as a real quid pro crow." — original example

Running a sentence past the end of a poetic line so the meaning spills into the next.

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills - the sentence pours over the line break." — I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth
• "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow - four sentences' worth of breaks inside one sentence." — The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams
• "Milton's blank verse in Paradise Lost runs its sense 'variously drawn out from one verse into another' - his own description of the technique." — Paradise Lost, John Milton

A deliberate pause inside a line of verse, usually marked by punctuation.

• "To be, or not to be - that is the question - the dash is the hinge the whole line swings on." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man." — An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope
• "Old English verse such as Beowulf is built on a strong mid-line pause dividing each line into two half-lines." — Beowulf