Words & WritingGreek → English
Symploce
/ˈsɪmpləsi/noun
A figure of speech that repeats the same opening words and the same closing words across successive clauses.
The Greek roots
σύν
sýn
together, with
πλέκειν
plékein
to plait, weave
Literally: “an intertwining”
The story of the word
Take a clause that begins and ends the way the clause before it did, and you have symploce: anaphora and epistrophe working at once. Greek συμπλοκή is a plaiting, from πλέκειν, to braid, which is what the figure does to a pair of sentences. Tudor rhetoric handbooks list it among the figures of repetition, and preachers have kept it alive since, because a sentence fixed at both ends is easy to chant back.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
symbiosissyntaxsymphonysympathy
In a sentence
The speech held its shape through sheer symploce, the same four words opening and closing every paragraph.
She marked the symploce in the margin beside two lines of the psalm.