Home › Glossary › Letter T

Trope

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A figure of speech where the meaning is changed by turning the word or phrase away from its literal sense

Detailed Definition
A trope is a broad category of figurative language that alters the ordinary meaning of words to achieve artistic, rhetorical, or emotional effect, encompassing metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, hyperbole, and other devices that operate through substitution, association, or inversion; in poetry, tropes are fundamental to meaning-making, allowing language to transcend literal reference and evoke complex realities through indirection—such as calling a king “the crown” (metonymy) or describing war as “a hungry beast” (metaphor)—thereby transforming perception and inviting readers into imaginative reinterpretation.
Example
Example in poetry:
Trope appears in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (metaphor); in Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers” (extended metaphor); in Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred” (simile and metaphor); in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Nazi imagery becomes a controversial historical trope; contemporary poet Claudia Rankine uses the “you” trope to implicate reader in racial dynamics.
Additional Notes
Figure of speech using words in non-literal sense. Includes metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony. Essential rhetorical device for poetic language; study alongside literal versus figurative meaning.
Also Known As
Figurative turn Rhetorical device Figure of speech Stylistic device
Skip to main content