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Figurative Language
Grade 8
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Alliteration | Alliteration is when you use words that have the same sound at the beginning, like "Stellar students synthesize sweet sentences." |
| Simile | A simile is a comparison between two fundamentally different things that usually uses the words like or as: "His voice was smooth, like butter in a warm pan." |
| Metaphor | A figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity: "All the world's a stage" "The world is your oyster" |
| Hyperbole | Extravagant exaggeration. Praising your favorite sports team is one thing, but if you call the team the most incredible group of humans ever to walk the earth, then you're going overboard and indulging in hyperbole. |
| Idiom | An expression whose meanings cannot be inferred from the meanings of the words that make it up -- can not be translated. For example, "kick the bucket" means "to die." |
| Personification | Personification is giving human qualities to an abstract idea. For example, “The sea is angry." |
| Pun | A pun is a play on words. If a bird flying overhead takes a poop on the cake you’re carrying, you could say “Isn’t that just the icing on the cake!” But only if you want to be punny. |
| Oxymoron | Jumbo shrimp? Open secret? Use oxymoron to refer to a word or phrase that contradicts itself, usually to create some rhetorical effect. |
| Onomatopoeia | Boom! Bang! Crash! When a word is formed from the sound that an associated thing makes, call it an example of onomatopoeia. |
| Dramatic Irony | Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows something that the characters don’t. If you’re watching a film about the Titanic and a character on the balcony says, "It's so beautiful I could just die," before it hits the iceberg, that’s dramatic irony. |
| Situational Irony | When something happens that's the complete opposite of what you expected, that's situational irony. Your local fire station burning down would be an unfortunate example of situational irony. |
| Verbal Irony | When you use verbal irony, you deliberately say something that is very different from what you actually mean. If you look up at an impending thunderstorm and say, "It's a perfect day for a picnic," that's verbal irony. |
| Tone | Tone in literature refers to the author’s attitude toward a certain topic. Through specific word choice, the author reveals their feelings and opinions to the reader, conveying the author’s intentions behind the text. |
| Mood | Mood refers to the emotions that a text evokes from the reader. Mood words are often the same as emotion words. |
| Repetition | Repetition is a literary device in which a word or phrase is used multiple times. Repetition can be found throughout literature. Most commonly, it is found in poetry and speeches to create rhythm or emphasize a word or phrase. |
| Dialect | The usage or vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group of people. If the language you speak in your region is different in vocabulary, grammar and accent than the main form of the language, you speak a dialect. |
| Allusion | An allusion often references a famous work of art or literature, or to something from your own life. For example, you might say, "I obviously am no expert at love" — an allusion to your failed relationships. |
| Foreshadowing | Foreshadowing is an advance sign or warning of what is to come in the future. The author of a mystery novel might use foreshadowing in an early chapter of her book to give readers an inkling of an impending murder. |
| Imagery | The use of vivid, descriptive language in literature, especially language that appeals to the senses. |
| Stanza | A fixed number of lines of verse forming a unit of a poem. Stanzas are the building blocks of formal poetry, like paragraphs in a story or verses in a song. They usually have the same number of lines each time, and often use a rhyming pattern that repeats |
| Poem | A composition written in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines. There are so many different kinds of poems it's almost impossible to define, but usually poems are written in short lines, and sometimes don't have too many lines. |
| Assonance | In poetry, assonance is when vowels within a word rhyme with other words, and there are lots of examples. Here’s one from English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “That solitude which suits abstruser musings.” |
Created by:
ms.ahlers
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