Word.ws English Dictionary

topos

/ˈtoʊpɒs/

topos noun: a literary theme or motif; a rhetorical convention or formula.

Noun

topos (plural topoi or toposes)

  1. A literary theme or motif; a rhetorical convention or formula.
    • The ritual of weighing the soul was an iconographic topos familiar to Christianity from the ceremony of the weighing of sins at the Last Judgement.2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, published 2004, page 239
  2. A category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space (or, more generally, on a site).
  3. (slang, Rugby School) A toilet.

Forms of topos

pluraltopoi
pluraltoposes

Plural of topos: topoi or toposes

Origin of topos

From Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “place”). Compare topic.

Phrases with topos

Questions about topos

What does topos mean?
Topos means a literary theme or motif; a rhetorical convention or formula.
What part of speech is topos?
Topos is a noun.
How do you pronounce topos?
Topos is pronounced /ˈtoʊpɒs/.
What is the plural of topos?
The plural of topos is topoi.

Words near topos in the dictionary

  1. topophones
  2. topophotomap
  3. topophotomaps
  4. Topor
  5. Topors
  6. topos
  7. toposcope
  8. toposcopes
  9. toposequence
  10. toposequences
  11. toposes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: topos (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: “topos.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/topos. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.