Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The use of circumlocution.
- noun A circumlocution.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A roundabout way of speaking; a roundabout phrase or expression; the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea; a phrase employed to avoid a common and trite manner of expression; circumlocution.
- noun Synonyms Circumlocution, etc. See
pleonasm .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun See
periphrase .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The use of a
longer expression instead of ashorter one with a similar meaning, for example "I am going to" instead of "I will". - noun linguistics Expressing a grammatical meaning (such as a
tense ) using asyntactic construction rather thanmorphological marking. - noun rhetoric The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name (a species of circumlocution)
- noun rhetoric The use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a style that involves indirect ways of expressing things
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The distinction had to be explained with much periphrasis, because the Arabic word 'Câtil' means a slayer, and is given indiscriminately to all who kill.
Oriental Encounters Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 Marmaduke William Pickthall 1905
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Now this manner of speaking is called a periphrasis, viz., when one embraces two things in one statement [2202].
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From this paragraph I conclude, though not without some perplexity, that by 'the body and blood verily and indeed taken,' we are not to understand body and blood in their limited sense, as contradistinguished from the soul or Godhead of Christ, but as a 'periphrasis' for Christ himself, or at least Christ's humanity.
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Coleridge 1820
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I have often heard it repeated as an observation of sagacity and experience, that when one friend has a piece of disagreeable intelligence to disclose to another, it is better to describe it directly, and in simple terms, than to introduce it with that kind of periphrasis and circumlocution, which oftener tends to excite a vague and impatient horror in the reader, than to prepare him to bear his misfortune with decency and fortitude.
Italian Letters, Vols. I and II The History of the Count de St. Julian William Godwin 1796
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P.S. Don't forget to send by Milton my old clothes and linen that once was clean -- a pretty "periphrasis" that! [
Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803
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I would point here specifically to Longinus's later comments on periphrasis, "with its odour of empty talk and its swelling amplitude."
On the Sublime Hal Duncan 2010
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I would point here specifically to Longinus's later comments on periphrasis, "with its odour of empty talk and its swelling amplitude."
Archive 2010-03-01 Hal Duncan 2010
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Which is not the same, although a close periphrasis.
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Para-puh-lease, but this periphrasis was most beneficial to my lexicon.
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Horace's Epicuri de grege, but let none add to it the sad spondee which ends the hemistich, "is more unsettling, since it mainly seems devoted to playing, through negation and elaborate periphrasis, with the possibility of referring to its subject as" an
Economies of Excess in Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, and Baudelaire 2007
quaxanta commented on the word periphrasis
the Greek cousin of circumlocution
December 13, 2006
knitandpurl commented on the word periphrasis
"as the animals grow tired of our zen mistakes—
sitting Indian-style in airliner seats
that have washed up on the shore,
calling the snake a rope and the rope a belt—
initiates of a time periphrasis so elaborate
that even Virgil gets a little cross"
from Postpoem by Rick Snyder, in Escape from Combray, p 9
October 7, 2010
rohan commented on the word periphrasis
search engine optimization service
January 18, 2012