trope
UK /tɹəʊp/ · US /tɹoʊp/ noun, verb
Forms tropes troping troped
- noun (art, literature) Something recurring across a genre or type of art or literature; a motif.
- noun (medieval Christianity) An addition (of dialogue, song, music, etc.) to a standard element of the liturgy, serving as an embellishment.
- noun (rhetoric) A figure of speech in which words or phrases are used with a nonliteral or figurative meaning, such as a metaphor.
- noun A tangent space meeting a quartic surface in a conic.
- noun (archaic) The reciprocal of a node on a surface.
- noun A short cadence at the end of the melody in some early music.
- noun A pair of complementary hexachords in twelve-tone technique.
- noun (Judaism) A cantillation pattern, or one of the marks that represents it.
- verb (transitive) To use, or embellish something with, a trope.
- verb To represent something figuratively or metaphorically, especially as a literary motif.
- verb To turn into, coin, or create a new trope.
- verb To analyse a work in terms of its literary tropes.
- verb (intransitive) To think or write in terms of tropes.
Synonyms
ta'amim teamim te'amim tropify figure of speech figure image
Etymology
From Latin tropus, from Ancient Greek τρόπος (trópos, “a manner, style, turn, way; a trope or figure of speech; a mode in music; a mode or mood in logic”), related to τροπή (tropḗ, “solstice; trope; turn”) and τρέπειν (trépein, “to turn”); compare turn of phrase. The verb is derived from the noun.
Webster’s 1913
- noun Note: Tropes are chiefly of four kinds: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Some authors make figures the genus, of which trope is a species; others make them different things, defining trope to be a change of sense, and figure to be any ornament, except what becomes so by such change.
Etymology [L. tropus, Gr. Torture, and cf. Trophy, Tropic, Troubadour, Trover.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “trope”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details