In the 16th century, Turkish women could divorce their husbands if the man failed to keep his family’s pot filled with coffee.
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
Recent Word Finds
Word of the Day
8 June 2025
EXECUTION
(noun) (law) the completion of a legal instrument (such as a contract or deed) by signing it (and perhaps sealing and delivering it) so that it becomes legally binding and enforceable
Coffee Trivia
