50 Key Terms for AP Lit

Flashcard deck · A.P. English Literature and Composition · Language Arts

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Flashcards covering AP Lit terms like chiasmus, enjambement, anastrophe, villanelle, caesura, and dramatic irony to build your literary analysis vocabulary.

Terms in this deck

End Rhyme: Rhyme in which the last word at the end of each verse line is the word that rhymes.
Characterization: An author's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create a vivid, realistic character and evoke a reaction in the reader.
Diction: An author's choice of a particular word over others to convey a specific meaning or effect.
Chiasmus: A literary scheme that inverts parallel word order to create a crisscross pattern, such as 'By day the frolic, and the dance by night.'
Enjambement: A poetic line with no end pause or punctuation whose grammatical meaning runs uninterrupted into the next line; also called a run-on line.
Elegy: Broadly, a poem dealing with lamentation, complaints about love, or somber meditations; originally written in alternating hexameter and pentameter lines.
Exact Rhyme: Rhyme in which both the consonant sounds and vowel sounds match perfectly between two words; also called perfect rhyme.
Frame Narrative: A larger story that contains one or more smaller embedded stories within it; the smaller stories are called framed or embedded narratives.
Alliteration: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound.
Conceit: An elaborate, unusual comparison using unlikely metaphors, similes, hyperbole, and contradiction; also called a metaphysical conceit.
Consonance: A type of alliteration where a repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels, as in 'linger, longer, languor.'
Blank Verse: Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with accents on even-numbered syllables; also called unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Connotation: The extra meaning or emotional tinge a word carries beyond its strict dictionary definition.
Carpe Diem: Latin for 'seize the day'; a common literary theme urging readers to enjoy life before it ends.
Hyperbole: A trope of deliberate exaggeration or overstatement used for emphasis or effect.
Allegory: Writing in verse or prose with a double meaning, acting as an extended metaphor where persons or events represent something beyond their literal selves on a symbolic level.
Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in nearby words or syllables within a line of poetry.
Anastrophe: A type of hyperbaton involving inverted word order, such as placing an adjective after its noun instead of before it.
Foil: A character who contrasts with another character to highlight or emphasize the other's opposing traits.
Dramatic Irony: A situation where the reader knows something about circumstances that a character in the story does not, creating tension or poignancy.
Denotation: The minimal, strict dictionary definition of a word, disregarding any emotional or historical connotation.
Apostrophe: Addressing an abstraction or personification that is not physically present, such as speaking directly to Death.
Closed Poetic Form: Poetry written in a specific traditional pattern with required rhyme, meter, line length, and number of lines, such as sonnets or haiku.
Ellipsis: As a rhetorical device, the artful omission of a word implied by a previous clause; also a punctuation mark of three periods indicating omitted text.
Caesura: A pause separating phrases within a line of poetry, forming an important part of poetic rhythm.
Cacophony: The use of words in poetry that combine sharp, harsh, hissing, or unmelodious sounds.
Euphony: The grouping of words so that consonants permit an easy, pleasing flow of sound when spoken aloud.
Anaphora: The intentional repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive clauses to create a rhetorical or artistic effect.
Allusion: A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another text, often without explicit identification, assuming readers recognize the source.
Couplet: Two consecutive lines of the same metrical length that end in a rhyme, forming a complete unit.
Quatrain: A stanza of four lines, often rhyming in an ABAB pattern.
Point of View: The method of narration that determines who tells the story and the angle from which events unfold, governing the reader's access to the story.
Synecdoche: A rhetorical trope where a part of something represents the whole, or the whole represents a part, such as 'all hands on deck' meaning all sailors.
Irony: Saying one thing while meaning another. Includes verbal irony (sarcasm), dramatic irony (reader knows what a character does not), and situational irony (oddly appropriate accidental events).
Rhyme: A matching similarity of sounds in two or more words, especially when accented vowels and succeeding consonants are identical.
Imagery: All sensory perceptions referred to in a literary passage, including visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic sensations.
Situational Irony: A trope where accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, with both the character and audience aware of the irony simultaneously.
Syntax: Word order and sentence structure, as distinct from diction, which is the choice of words.
Juxtaposition: Placing two or more ideas, characters, settings, or words side-by-side for comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, or character development.
Villanelle: A nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets and a concluding quatrain, with specific repeated lines and only two rhyming sounds throughout.
Tone: The attitude or mood conveyed by an author's choices in characters, setting, diction, and style, reflecting the underlying perspective of the work.
Oxymoron: A contradiction that oddly makes sense on a deeper level, such as 'jumbo shrimp' or 'without laws, we can have no freedom'; also called paradox.
Inexact Rhyme: Rhyme created from words with similar but not identical sounds; also called slant rhyme, near rhyme, or half rhyme.
Stanza: An arrangement of lines of verse in a pattern that is usually repeated throughout a poem.
Metonymy: Using a suggestive physical object to represent a more general idea, such as 'the crown' to represent royalty.
Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds imitate the noise they represent, used for rhetorical or artistic effect.
Tercet: A three-line unit or stanza of poetry.
Metaphor: A comparison stated so as to imply that one object is another, figuratively speaking, without using 'like' or 'as.'
Verbal Irony: A trope in which a speaker's actual meaning differs sharply from the literal words expressed; often sarcastic.
Meter: A recognizable pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress in a line of poetry.
Internal Rhyme: A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same line.
Periodic Sentence: A long sentence that is not grammatically complete or fully intelligible until the reader reaches its final portion.
Personification: Giving human qualities or characteristics to inanimate objects or abstract ideas, such as 'the ground thirsts for rain.'

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