Word.ws English Dictionary

chiasmus

/kaɪˈæzməs/

chiasmus noun: an inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases.

Noun

chiasmus (countable and uncountable, plural chiasmi or chiasmuses)

  1. (rhetoric) An inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases.
    • The book of Habakkuk has been discovered to consist of a closely knit chiastic structure throughout. This is the first poem of such length to stand revealed as a literary unit of this kind, though chiasmus has already been discovered throughout many psalms[…]1934, H. H. Walker, N. W. Lund, “The Literary Structure of the Book of Habakkuk”, in Journal of Biblical Literature, 53 (4): 355
    • John F. Kennedy is more famous for his chiasmus than for many of his policies:
      "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."1984, Ethel Grodzins Romm, “Persuasive Writing”, in American Bar Association Journal, 70: 158
    Synonyms:
    chiasm

Examples of chiasmus in a sentence

  • Leeman therefore holds that chiasmus is the basic order in Greek and Latin: antithesis is, he claims, normal for the modern, rational mind, but for the Greeks and Romans chiasmus was more natural.2002, Simon R. Slings, “Figures of Speech in Aristophanes”, in Andreas Willi, editor, The Language of Greek Comedy, pages 103–104:
  • The realization that Mawlānā was using parallelism and chiasmus to organize the higher levels of his work has been a major surprise.2009, Seyed Ghahreman Safavi, Simon Weightman, Rūmī's Mystical Design: Reading the Mathnawī, Book One, page 46:

Synonyms of chiasmus

Forms of chiasmus

pluralchiasmi
pluralchiasmuses

Origin of chiasmus

Learned borrowing from Latin chiasmus, borrowed from Ancient Greek χιασμός (khiasmós), from χῑᾰ́ζω (khīắzō, “to mark with an X”) + -μός (-mós).

Words formed from chiasmus

Questions about chiasmus

What does chiasmus mean?
Chiasmus means an inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases.
How do you use chiasmus in a sentence?
Leeman therefore holds that chiasmus is the basic order in Greek and Latin: antithesis is, he claims, normal for the modern, rational mind, but for the Greeks and Romans chiasmus was more natural.
What part of speech is chiasmus?
Chiasmus is a noun.
How do you pronounce chiasmus?
Chiasmus is pronounced /kaɪˈæzməs/.
What is the plural of chiasmus?
The plural of chiasmus is chiasmi.

Words near chiasmus in the dictionary

  1. chiasmi
  2. chiasmic
  3. chiasmodontid
  4. chiasmodontids
  5. chiasms
  6. chiasmus
  7. chiasmuses
  8. Chiasso
  9. Chiasson
  10. Chiassons
  11. chiastic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chiasmus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-chiasmus.ogg.

Cite this entry: “chiasmus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chiasmus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.