Words & WritingGreek → English
Trope
/troʊp/noun
A figure of speech, or a convention that recurs so often it becomes recognisable on sight.
The Greek roots
τρόπος
trópos
a turn, way, manner
Literally: “a turn”
Follow a root:τρόπος4 words
The story of the word
A trope turns a word away from its plain sense, which is exactly what τρέπω, to turn, describes. Classical rhetoric kept a strict list of them, metaphor and metonymy and irony among the main ones, and separated tropes from schemes, which rearrange word order instead. The modern sense, a stock convention in film or fiction, is twentieth-century and would have puzzled a Greek teacher of rhetoric, though he would recognise the root in the tropics, where the sun turns back.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1530s
Same family
tropicalheliotropeentropytropismapotropaic
In a sentence
The wise old mentor who dies in act two is the oldest trope in the genre.
He listed the tropes on the whiteboard and asked which ones the poem was refusing.