TROPE
trope, figure of speech, figure, image
(noun) language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense
Source: WordNet® 3.1
Etymology
Noun
trope (plural tropes)
(art, literature) Something recurring across a genre or type of art or literature, such as the ‘mad scientist’ of horror movies or the use of the phrase ‘once upon a time’ as an introduction to fairy tales; a motif.
(rhetoric) A figure of speech in which words or phrases are used with a nonliteral or figurative meaning, such as a metaphor.
(geometry) Mathematical senses.
A tangent space meeting a quartic surface in a conic.
(archaic) The reciprocal of a node on a surface.
(music) Musical senses.
A short cadence at the end of the melody in some early music.
A pair of complementary hexachords in twelve-tone technique.
(Judaism) A cantillation pattern, or one of the marks that represents it.
(Roman Catholicism) A phrase or verse added to the Mass when sung by a choir.
(philosophy) Philosophical senses.
(Greek philosophy) Any of the ten arguments used in skepticism to refute dogmatism.
(metaphysics) A particular instance of a property (such as the specific redness of a rose), as contrasted with a universal.
Usage notes
In the art or literature sense, the word trope is similar to archetype and cliché, but is not necessarily pejorative.
Verb
trope (third-person singular simple present tropes, present participle troping, simple past and past participle troped)
(transitive) To use, or embellish something with, a trope.
(transitive) Senses relating chiefly to art or literature.
To represent something figuratively or metaphorically, especially as a literary motif.
To turn into, coin, or create a new trope.
To analyse a work in terms of its literary tropes.
(intransitive) To think or write in terms of tropes.
Synonyms
• tropify
Anagrams
• Perot, Petro, Porte, opter, petro, petro-, ptero-, repot, tepor, toper
Source: Wiktionary
Trope, n. Etym: [L. tropus, Gr. Torture, and cf. Trophy, Tropic,
Troubadour, Trover.] (Rhet.)
(a) The use of a word or expression in a different sense from that
which properly belongs to it; the use of a word or expression as
changed from the original signification to another, for the sake of
giving life or emphasis to an idea; a figure of speech.
(b) The word or expression so used.
In his frequent, long, and tedious speeches, it has been said that a
trope never passed his lips. Bancroft.
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.
Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition