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| a word that names or signifies something specific: “Wind” is the denotation for air in natural motion. “Poodle” is the denotation for a certain breed of dog. |
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| The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy." |
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| A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them. |
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| the sign ('), as used: to indicate the omission of one or more letters in a word, whether unpronounced, as in o'er for over, or pronounced, as in gov't for government; to indicate the possessive case, as in man's; or to indicate plurals of abbreviations and symbols, as in several M.D.'s, 3's. |
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| an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity" or "reach for the stars" |
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| the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, esp. as a rhetorical figure |
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| the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent |
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| a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose.” |
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