About Rhetogen

Rhetogen is a working writer’s reference for the named figures of speech — the schemes (figures of arrangement) and tropes (figures of meaning) that classical rhetoric and modern stylistics enumerate. It’s the site you reach for when you want to know exactly what chiasmus is, see it used well, understand how it differs from antimetabole, and decide whether to deploy it.

The catalog draws primarily from Silva Rhetoricae (Brigham Young University) — the canonical online catalog of classical and Renaissance rhetorical figures — supplemented with post-Renaissance additions like allusion, malapropism, kenning, paraprosdokian, and spoonerism.

Every example is sourced: author, work, and year, or scripture book, chapter, verse, and translation. Where two figures sit close to one another — zeugma vs. syllepsis, metonymy vs. synecdoche, antimetabole vs. chiasmus — the entry says where the line falls and what the test is in practice.