Word.ws English Dictionary

rhopalic

rhopalic adjective: having each successive word longer by a letter or syllable.

Adjective

rhopalic (comparative more rhopalic, superlative most rhopalic)

  1. (rhetoric) Having each successive word longer by a letter or syllable.
    • Soapy fired off a rhopalic sentence, that is, one in which each word is one letter longer than the word that precedes it: "I am the only dummy player, perhaps, planning maneuvers calculated brilliantly, nevertheless outstandingly pachydermatous, notwithstanding unconstitutional unprofessionalism."1986 October 26, Alan Truscott, “Talking About Behavior”, in The New York Times

Noun

rhopalic (plural rhopalics)

  1. A rhopalic poem.

Forms of rhopalic

Adjective
comparativemore rhopalic
superlativemost rhopalic
Noun
pluralrhopalics

Origin of rhopalic

From Latin rhopalicus, from Ancient Greek ῥόπαλον (rhópalon, “club, bat”).

Questions about rhopalic

What does rhopalic mean?
Rhopalic means having each successive word longer by a letter or syllable.
What part of speech is rhopalic?
Rhopalic can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near rhopalic in the dictionary

  1. Rhoney
  2. Rhoneys
  3. Rhoose
  4. rhopalia
  5. rhopalial
  6. rhopalic
  7. rhopalics
  8. rhopalid
  9. rhopalids
  10. rhopalism
  11. rhopalium

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rhopalic (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.

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