figure of speech, any intentional deviation from literal statement or common usage that emphasizes, clarifies, or embellishes both written and spoken language. Forming an integral part of language, figures of speech are found in primitive oral literatures, as well as in polished poetry and prose and in everyday speech. Greeting-card rhymes, advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, the captions of cartoons, and the mottoes of families and institutions often use figures of speech, generally for humorous, mnemonic, or eye-catching purposes. The argots of sports, jazz, business, politics, or any specialized groups abound in figurative language.
Most figures in everyday speech are formed by extending the vocabulary of what is already familiar and better known to what is less well known. Thus metaphors (implied resemblances) derived from human physiology are commonly extended to nature or inanimate objects as in the expressions “the mouth of a river,” “the snout of a glacier,” “the bowels of the earth,” or “the eye of a needle.” Conversely, resemblances to natural phenomena are frequently applied to other areas, as in the expressions “a wave of enthusiasm,” “a ripple of excitement,” or “a storm of abuse.” Use of simile (a comparison, usually indicated by “like” or “as”) is exemplified in “We were packed in the room like sardines.” Personification (speaking of an abstract quality or inanimate object as if it were a person) is exemplified in “Money talks”; metonymy (using the name of one thing for another closely related to it), in “How would the Pentagon react?”; synecdoche (use of a part to imply the whole), in expressions such as “brass” for high-ranking military officers or “hard hats” for construction workers.
Other common forms of figurative speech are hyperbole (deliberate exaggeration for the sake of effect), as in “I’m so mad I could chew nails”; the rhetorical question (asked for effect, with no answer expected), as in “How can I express my thanks to you?”; litotes (an emphasis by negation), as in “It’s no fun to be sick”; and onomatopoeia (imitation of natural sounds by words), in such words as “crunch,” “gurgle,” “plunk,” and “splash.”
Almost all the figures of speech that appear in everyday speech may also be found in literature. In serious poetry and prose, however, their use is more fully conscious, more artistic, and much more subtle; it thus has a stronger intellectual and emotional impact, is more memorable, and sometimes contributes a range and depth of association and suggestion far beyond the scope of the casual colloquial use of imagery.
In European languages figures of speech are generally classified in five major categories: (1) figures of resemblance or relationship (e.g., simile, metaphor, kenning, conceit, parallelism, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, and euphemism); (2) figures of emphasis or understatement (e.g., hyperbole, litotes, rhetorical question, antithesis, climax, bathos, paradox, oxymoron, and irony); (3) figures of sound (e.g., alliteration, repetition, anaphora, and onomatopoeia); (4) verbal games and gymnastics (e.g., pun and anagram); and (5) errors (e.g., malapropism, periphrasis, and spoonerism). Figures involving a change in sense, such as metaphor, simile, and irony, are called tropes.
All languages use figures of speech, but differences of language dictate different stylistic criteria. In a culture not influenced by classical Greece and Rome, some figures may be absent; irony is likely to be confined to fairly sophisticated cultures. Japanese poetry is based on delicate structures of implication and an entire vocabulary of aesthetic values almost untranslatable to the West. Arabic literature is rich in simile and metaphor, but the constructions used are so different from those familiar in the West that translation requires much adaptation. This condition is also true of the oral literatures of Africa and of the written literatures deriving from them.
One of the most powerful single literary influences upon world cultures has been the Bible. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament are rich in simile, metaphor, and personification and in the special figure of Hebrew poetry, parallelism.