Glossary
- Page ID
- 100896
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\(\newcommand{\avec}{\mathbf a}\) \(\newcommand{\bvec}{\mathbf b}\) \(\newcommand{\cvec}{\mathbf c}\) \(\newcommand{\dvec}{\mathbf d}\) \(\newcommand{\dtil}{\widetilde{\mathbf d}}\) \(\newcommand{\evec}{\mathbf e}\) \(\newcommand{\fvec}{\mathbf f}\) \(\newcommand{\nvec}{\mathbf n}\) \(\newcommand{\pvec}{\mathbf p}\) \(\newcommand{\qvec}{\mathbf q}\) \(\newcommand{\svec}{\mathbf s}\) \(\newcommand{\tvec}{\mathbf t}\) \(\newcommand{\uvec}{\mathbf u}\) \(\newcommand{\vvec}{\mathbf v}\) \(\newcommand{\wvec}{\mathbf w}\) \(\newcommand{\xvec}{\mathbf x}\) \(\newcommand{\yvec}{\mathbf y}\) \(\newcommand{\zvec}{\mathbf z}\) \(\newcommand{\rvec}{\mathbf r}\) \(\newcommand{\mvec}{\mathbf m}\) \(\newcommand{\zerovec}{\mathbf 0}\) \(\newcommand{\onevec}{\mathbf 1}\) \(\newcommand{\real}{\mathbb R}\) \(\newcommand{\twovec}[2]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\ctwovec}[2]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\threevec}[3]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cthreevec}[3]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\fourvec}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cfourvec}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\fivevec}[5]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \\ #5 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cfivevec}[5]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \\ #5 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\mattwo}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{rr}#1 \amp #2 \\ #3 \amp #4 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\laspan}[1]{\text{Span}\{#1\}}\) \(\newcommand{\bcal}{\cal B}\) \(\newcommand{\ccal}{\cal C}\) \(\newcommand{\scal}{\cal S}\) \(\newcommand{\wcal}{\cal W}\) \(\newcommand{\ecal}{\cal E}\) \(\newcommand{\coords}[2]{\left\{#1\right\}_{#2}}\) \(\newcommand{\gray}[1]{\color{gray}{#1}}\) \(\newcommand{\lgray}[1]{\color{lightgray}{#1}}\) \(\newcommand{\rank}{\operatorname{rank}}\) \(\newcommand{\row}{\text{Row}}\) \(\newcommand{\col}{\text{Col}}\) \(\renewcommand{\row}{\text{Row}}\) \(\newcommand{\nul}{\text{Nul}}\) \(\newcommand{\var}{\text{Var}}\) \(\newcommand{\corr}{\text{corr}}\) \(\newcommand{\len}[1]{\left|#1\right|}\) \(\newcommand{\bbar}{\overline{\bvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\bhat}{\widehat{\bvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\bperp}{\bvec^\perp}\) \(\newcommand{\xhat}{\widehat{\xvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\vhat}{\widehat{\vvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\uhat}{\widehat{\uvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\what}{\widehat{\wvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\Sighat}{\widehat{\Sigma}}\) \(\newcommand{\lt}{<}\) \(\newcommand{\gt}{>}\) \(\newcommand{\amp}{&}\) \(\definecolor{fillinmathshade}{gray}{0.9}\)| Words (or words that have the same definition) | The definition is case sensitive | (Optional) Image to display with the definition [Not displayed in Glossary, only in pop-up on pages] | (Optional) Caption for Image | (Optional) External or Internal Link | (Optional) Source for Definition |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Eg. "Genetic, Hereditary, DNA ...") | (Eg. "Relating to genes or heredity") |  |
The infamous double helix | https://bio.libretexts.org/ | CC-BY-SA; Delmar Larsen |
|
Word(s) |
Definition |
Image | Caption | Link | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract | referring to ideas or concepts that we think with our minds | ||||
| Action | the physical movements of actors | ||||
| Actors | people performing a play | ||||
| Allegory | a kind of story in which abstract concepts (such as love, war, or death) became objects, characters, or places in the story; usually didactic (meant to impart a lesson) | ||||
| Alliteration | multiple words in a row which start with the same sound (vowel or consonant) | ||||
| Allusion | an indirect reference, usually to another work, outside of the text, without explicitly naming the reference point | ||||
| Anagnorisis | the scene of recognition in a Tragedy, as described in Aristotle’s Poetics | ||||
| Analysis | the breaking apart of anything into its composite parts for close examination | ||||
| Anapest | a metrical foot with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable | ||||
| Annotated Bibliography | a tool to help you keep track of your research by creating a Works Cited page in which every source is summarized after the bibliographical entry | ||||
| Antagonist | an opposing force to the protagonist | ||||
| Anthropomorphism | imbuing a nonhuman entity with human behaviors or attributes | ||||
| Antihero | a type of protagonist who may not have the moral uprightness required of a hero; this character usually elicits the sympathy of their audience, but may be morally unscrupulous in their methods | ||||
| Archetype | an original pattern or model for a type of character, object, narrative, etc. | ||||
| Audience | people viewing a play or reading a literary work | ||||
| Ballad | a poem that tells a story and is written in quatrains, most commonly with an A B C B rhyme scheme; the first and third lines contain eight syllables, while the second and fourth lines contain six | ||||
| Beat | a stressed syllable | ||||
| Caesura | a pause or break within the line of a poem | ||||
| Canonical | referring to a work that is officially decided to constitute literature, making it part of the Literary Canon (a collection of works that are considered by the powers that be to constitute literature) | ||||
| Catharsis | the purgation of emotion, usually pity and fear, at the end of a play | ||||
| Character | an imaginary personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a story | ||||
| Characterization | the strategies that an author uses to present and develop the characters in a narrative | ||||
| Claim | an argument backed up with evidence that supports the idea | ||||
| Classical Unities | in drama, the unities of action, time, and place | ||||
| Climax | the turning point of a story; the incident that allows the main conflict of a story to resolve | ||||
| Concrete | referring to specific, individual things we can feel with our five senses and that call an exact image into our mind’s eye | ||||
| Conflict | the tension in a literary work created by opposition between one or more of the following: (1) protagonist vs. antagonist (2) protagonist vs. self (3) protagonist vs. environment (4) protagonist vs. society, or some other oppositional relationship | ||||
| Connotation | the non-literal meaning we associate with words | ||||
| Content | the message that is written in a literary work | ||||
| Couplet | two adjoining lines of poetry which share an end rhyme | ||||
| Creative Nonfiction | true stories that contain all of the literary adornments that fiction does (literary devices, skilled writing, etc.) | ||||
| Crossed Rhyme | the rhyming of one word in the middle of a verse line with a word in the middle of the following line | ||||
| Dactyl | a metrical foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables | ||||
| Denotation | the dictionary definition of a word | ||||
| Dénouement | the unraveling of a plot, a resolution to a story; in the dénouement, the central conflict is resolved | ||||
| Dialogue | a conversation between two or more people | ||||
| Diction | word choice | ||||
| Double Rhyme | a rhyme on two syllables, the first stressed, the second unstressed | ||||
| Drama | literature in which action is performed and all words are spoken before an audience by actors impersonating the characters | ||||
| End Rhyme | rhyme occurring on stressed syllables at the ends of verse lines | ||||
| End-stopped | when a line of poetry ends with a form of punctuation, or with a complete phrase | ||||
| Enjambed | when a line of poetry does not end with punctuation | ||||
| Evidence | in a literature essay, quotes or paraphrasing from authoritative primary or secondary sources, which supports the paragraph main idea, as well as the thesis main idea; usually, one quote or paraphrase per paragraph is an effective use of evidence | ||||
| Exposition | the part of a story that introduces the setting and the main characters; the exposition also hints at the themes and conflicts that will develop later in the story | ||||
| External Conflict | when two individuals or groups of individuals clash | ||||
| Eye Rhyme | a visual-only rhyme; i.e. when spellings match but in pronunciation there is no rhyme | ||||
| Falling Action | the events that take place after the climax of a story; these events show the results of the climax, and they act as a bridge between the climax and the dénouement | ||||
| Fiction | a story invented from the imagination of a writer | ||||
| Figurative Language | the use of words or expressions not meant to be taken literally | ||||
| Flashback | a device used to give the reader background information that happened in the past | ||||
| Focalisation | the perspective through which a narrative is presented | ||||
| Foil | a character which, through juxtaposition, reveals something about another character; a kind of shadow character | ||||
| Foot | each complete unit of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry | ||||
| Form | how a literary work is arranged; the language used to send the message | ||||
| Genre | a means of categorization for works of literature based on the style of writing; the most common genres of literature are creative nonfiction, fiction, drama and poetry | ||||
| Hamartia | the “fatal flaw” which brings about the downfall of a tragedy’s hero | ||||
| Hyperbole | an exaggeration for rhetorical effect | ||||
| Iamb | the most common metrical foot in English with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one | ||||
| Iambic Pentameter | a style of poetic meter in which five sets of iambs (or ten syllables) appear per line of poem | ||||
| If-then Statement | a strategy for making inferences by establishing a cause-and-effect relationship | ||||
| Imagery | descriptive, immersive details meant to paint a picture in the reader’s mind; the five kinds of description follow the five senses: auditory (sound), tactile (touch), gustatory (taste), olfactory (smell), and visual (sight) | ||||
| Inciting Incident | the event that sets the main conflict into motion in a story | ||||
| Inference | a conclusion you reach by applying logic to the evidence you are given | ||||
| Internal Conflict | a struggle that takes place within an individual | ||||
| Internal Rhyme | rhyme occurring within a single verse line | ||||
| Internalized Setting | a setting in which an aspect of the story external to a character represents the character's internal development | ||||
| Inverted Syntax | when writers disrupt the grammatical order of words in unusual ways | ||||
| Irony | a meaning or outcome contrary to what is expected; the three types of irony are dramatic (when the reader or audience knows something characters don’t), situational (when a character holds a position or has an expectation that is reversed or fulfilled in an unexpected way), and verbal (when a speaker or narrator says one thing and means the reverse) | ||||
| Kairos | the temporal and cultural context of a piece of rhetoric | ||||
| Line | in poetry, one of the units of structure in verse; lines/rows work as both a unit of sensibility and music | ||||
| Literary Critic | a person who studies and analyzes literature | ||||
| Literary Criticism | scholarship produced by literary critics, such as articles analyzing literature | ||||
| Literary Devices | literary techniques used by authors, such as metaphor, simile, personification, and imagery | ||||
| Love Interest | a character who is a (potential) partner in love for the protagonist | ||||
| Meme | an image or video containing cultural values or ideas, often represented through allusion | ||||
| Messenger | a character who delivers news | ||||
| Metaphor | the use of figurative language to describe one object using another for rhetorical effect, without using the words "like" or "as" | ||||
| Meter | the rhythmical pattern of a poem, determined by stressed and unstressed syllables | ||||
| Metonymy | when one thing is represented by another thing associated with it | ||||
| Minor Character | a secondary or side character in a story who sometimes supports the protagonist or antagonist in their struggles | ||||
| Monologue | when one character delivers a speech to convey his or her thoughts | ||||
| Mood | the general feeling conveyed by a story | ||||
| Motif | a recurring element in a story | ||||
| Narrative | a story, an account of a series of related events or experiences | ||||
| Narrator | the speaker of the story, who may be a character within the story or an objective, unnamed narrator; the perspective from which the story is told | ||||
| Objectively | in an impartial manner, free of individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings | ||||
| Ode | a poem written in praise of its subject | ||||
| Omniscient Narrator | a narrator who has a God's eye view and can get into different characters' heads and perspectives, seeing the story in a way that would not be possible in real life | ||||
| Para-rhyme | a form of half rhyme when all the consonants of the relevant words match, not just the final consonants | ||||
| Pentameter | a line of five feet in poetry | ||||
| Penultimate | second to last | ||||
| Peripeteia | the reversal of fortune which occurs to a tragic hero | ||||
| Personification | giving human qualities to animals or objects for the sake of imagery | ||||
| Play | a work of literature which is meant to be performed by actors rather than simply read | ||||
| Playwright | an author who writes plays | ||||
| Plot | the events or action of a story, and the order in which the events are told | ||||
| Poetry | patterned arrangement of language to generate rhythm and thereby both express and evoke specific emotions in a concentrated way | ||||
| Prewriting | activities used by writers to get their ideas for writing | ||||
| Props | articles or objects on a stage during a play that are sometimes symbolic | ||||
| Prose Poem | a literary work that isn’t broken into verse but contains many of the elements of poetry: figures of speech, musical language, internal rhyme, repetition, condensed syntax, and imagery | ||||
| Prosody | the musical component of language that projects the speaker’s voice and breath | ||||
| Protagonist | the main character of a story, who is often but not always the hero of the story | ||||
| Quatrain | a stanza of four lines | ||||
| Reasonable Conclusion | an inference that is the result of reasoned thinking, not emotional reactions | ||||
| Repetition | a powerful rhetorical device that involves intentionally using similar events in the plot, similar descriptions, or the same word or phrase multiple times | ||||
| Revision | making changes to major elements in a paper and improving the overall argument | ||||
| Rhetorical Devices | words that serve a special function in the text in order to convey meaning to the reader | ||||
| Rhyme Scheme | the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem | ||||
| Rhythm | patterns of sound caused by the way some words or syllables are stressed more than others in speech | ||||
| Rising Action | a series of events that build up to the climax of a story by introducing secondary conflicts and creating tension in the story | ||||
| Roundel | an English form of poetry consisting of eleven lines in three stanzas with no set meter; the first part of line one repeats at the end of the first stanza and again as the last line of poem, with a rhyme scheme of A B A R–B A B–A B A R (in which R stands for “refrain”) | ||||
| Sets | the design, decoration, and scenery on a stage during a play | ||||
| Setting | the place(s) where the action of the story or poem takes place | ||||
| Simile | a figurative use of language in which one thing is compared to another using the words, similar to a metaphor except it uses the words “like” or “as” | ||||
| Slant Rhyme | also known as a half rhyme, an incomplete form of rhyme in which final consonants match but vowel sounds do not | ||||
| Soliloquy | a speech made by one character but delivered when he or she is alone on stage | ||||
| Sonnet | a fourteen-line poem that contains a volta, or a turn in thought, which can sometimes be indicated with the words “but” or “yet” | ||||
| Spondee | a two-syllable metrical foot that has two equally stressed beats | ||||
| Stage | the physical space upon which actors move in a play | ||||
| Stage Directions | written instructions in a script that inform how to stage, perform, or imagine a play | ||||
| Stanza | a poem paragraph: that is, a poem may be divided into clumps of lines for rhetorical effect | ||||
| Story | an account of imaginary or real people and events | ||||
| Subjectively | in a biased manner based on personal perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires | ||||
| Symbolism | the use of a physical object to represent an abstract idea | ||||
| Synecdoche | figurative language in which a part stands in for the whole | ||||
| Syntax | the order of words in a sentence | ||||
| Tercet | a stanza of three lines | ||||
| Tetrameter | a line of four feet | ||||
| Theme | the main idea(s) of a work of literature | ||||
| Tone | the attitude or mood of a literary work, and the style of narration | ||||
| Topic Sentence | a one-sentence summary at the beginning of a body paragraph that explains the main idea and suggests generally what the paragraph will talk about to support the essay's overall thesis; often includes a transition from previous paragraphs | ||||
| Tragic Hero | the focal character of a tragedy, who is mostly good but due to some flaw (hamartia) is doomed to fall; the character must go through plot elements such as peripeteia, anagnorisis, and ultimately result in catharsis | ||||
| Trochee | the second most common metrical foot in English with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one | ||||
| Unreliable Narrator | a first-person narrator of a work of literature who is not to be trusted; they may be morally questionable or dishonest, or have a flaw which makes them difficult to understand for the reader | ||||
| Verse | lines of poetry | ||||
| Villanelle | a French form of poetry that consists of five tercets and a final quatrain; the first stanza’s first and third lines repeat in an alternating pattern as the last line in the subsequent stanzas, and in the final quatrain, the two lines that have been repeating throughout the poem form the final two lines of the poem | ||||
| Volta | a turn in thought, emotion, or rhetoric | ||||
| Wise Elder | an old man or figure of wisdom who guides the protagonist in a play | ||||
| Writing Process | the steps involved in writing an essay, which may include reading, prewriting, researching, outlining, drafting, revising, seeking feedback, re-revising, and publishing | ||||
| Zeitgeist | spirit of the times |