We came across these language and literature terms on quizlet.com and thought that they were worth sharing. If you’re a writer or translator, you should really know these.
Terms |
Definitions |
|---|---|
| anecdote | a short account of an interesting or humorous incident |
| anthropomorphism | attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena |
| archetype | an original model or type after which other similar things are patterned; an ideal example |
| aphorism | a brief statement of a truth or opinion; a saying or an adage |
| construe | to explain the meaning of; interpret; to analyze the grammatical structure of |
| deduce | to reach a conclusion by reasoning; to infer from a general principle; to trace the origin of |
| epigram | a short, witty poem expressing a single thought or observation; a concise, clever, often paradoxical statement or saying |
| etymology | the origin and historical development of a word’s forms, meanings and usages |
| infer | to conclude or reason from evidence, premises, or circumstance; to hint or imply |
| irony | the use of words to express something different from, and often opposite to, their literal meaning; a literary style employing such contrasts for witty effect; incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs |
| onomatopoeia | the formation or use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions to which they refer |
| personification | a person or thing typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification; a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities or are represented as possessing human form |
| perspective | a mental view or outlook; a pint of view; the ability to perceive things in their actual interrelations or comparative importance |
| protagonist | the main character in a drama or other literary work |
| prose | ordinary speech or writing, without metrical structure |
| pun | play on words |
| rhetoric | an art that aims to improve the capability of writers or speakers that attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate |
| satire | a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony or wit |
| soliloquy | a dramatic or literary from of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself and reveals his or her thoughts without addressing a listener |
| trite | lacking power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition; hackneyed |
If you think there are some terms that should have been included in the list, we’d like to hear from you.
