Antanaclasis repeats an identical word while shifting its meaning according to context, as when “light” first means illumination and later means lack of weight. Unlike paronomasia, which usually plays on similar-sounding different words, antanaclasis depends on one repeated form carrying distinct senses. Poets use it to compress opposing ideas into a small verbal space and to show how language can resist fixed meaning. The device may produce humor or epigrammatic sharpness, but it can also dramatize moral uncertainty, emotional ambivalence, or the changing value of a word in different situations.

Antanaclasis relies on a repeated word changing sense, as in “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Context must make both meanings intelligible. Poets use it for epigrammatic wit, irony, and thematic doubleness; it differs from punning because the exact same word is repeated.