Word of the Day:
hyperbaton
What It Means
An inversion of the usual or logical order of words or phrases, for emphasis or poetic effect.
Adding a word or thought to a sentence that is already semantically complete, thus drawing emphasis to the addition.
Hyperbaton in Context
“In real life we often see a man under the influence of rage, or fear, […] begin a sentence, and then swerve aside into some inconsequent parenthesis, and then again double back to his original statement […]Now the figure hyperbaton is the means which is employed by the best writers to imitate these...”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from Latin hyperbaton, itself a borrowing from Ancient Greek ὑπερβατόν (huperbatón, “overstepping”), from ὑπερβαίνω (huperbaínō), from ὑπέρ (hupér) + βαίνω (baínō, “walk”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hyperbaton (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “hyperbaton.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hyperbaton. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
