Literary Tropes

The word trope comes from the Greek word tropos, for "turn." A trope is a way of turning the conventional meaning of a word into something else. A wide variety of rhetorical devices can be categorized as tropes; see the list of tropes on Wikipedia's Figure of speech page for one list. This section will discuss a few of the major tropes. I will note from the beginning that many critics do not classify irony, or at least all kinds of irony, as a trope. The following pages address metaphor and simile, metonymy and synecdoche, and irony.