chiasmus
Sign in to saveIn rhetoric, chiasmus ( ) or, less commonly, chiasm (Latin term from Greek , "crossing", from the Greek , , "to shape like the letter Χ"), is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words".
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Encyclopedic overview
8 sectionsContents
- Examples
- Conceptual chiasmus
- Effectiveness
- Thematic chiasmus
- See also
- References
- Sources
- External links
In rhetoric, chiasmus ( ) or, less commonly, chiasm (Latin term from Greek , "crossing", from the Greek , , "to shape like the letter Χ"), is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words".
A similar device, antimetabole, also involves a reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses in an A-B-B-A configuration, but unlike chiasmus, presents a repetition of words.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “chiasmus” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.