Figure of speech
The figure of speech is an ancient term for any form of expression in which the regular use of language is manipulated, stretched, or altered for rhetorical effect. E.g., in metaphor, a word generally used concerning one domain is extended to another; in a figure such as a chiasmus, words are placed in a deliberately striking order. Many individual figures, such as these, are distinguished in traditional western rhetoric. Some, like metaphor, have been taken directly into linguistics, e.g., in typologies of semantic change [Matthews, p. 138].
An expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or the standard word order or in which sound patterns produce an emphasis is called a figure of speech. Figures of speech are an essential resource of the verse, despite not every poem using it; it is also continuously present in every other kind of writing and speech, even if it is typically unnoticed [Baldick, p. 97].
A figure of speech is the opposite of a literal expression. Instead, it is a word or phrase meaning something more or different from what it seems to say.
A figure of speech in rhetoric is a type of figurative language (such as metaphor, irony, understatement, or anaphora) that departs from conventional word order or meaning.
Some examples of figures of speech: alliteration, anaphora, antimetabole, antithesis, apostrophe, assonance, hyperbole, irony, metonymy, onomatopoeia, paradox, personification, pun, simile, synecdoche, and understatement [ThoughtCo].
⠀ Chris Baldick. (2015). The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
⠀ Figure of speech. ThoughtCo. Retrieved from: https://www.thoughtco.com/figure-of-speech-term-1690793.
⠀ Matthews P.H. (2007). Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.