What does ploce mean?

"A wife who was a wife indeed." The second "wife" is ploce (PLOH-see), a scheme of repetition: the same word brought back at intervals, usually for emphasis and often with a slight shift in sense on its return. A scheme is a figure of arrangement, where the effect lives in the placement of words rather than in any word standing for something else. The complication is that ploce is one of the loosest terms in the whole repetition family. Some handbooks treat it as a near-synonym for traductio, others draw a sharp line, and a few use it for the very thing antanaclasis and polyptoton name more precisely. So the clean definition you came for depends on which of those you're working from.

What Counts as Ploce, With Examples

Ploce is the repetition of a single word at intervals across a passage, spaced out rather than stacked back to back, almost always to press emphasis and often to fold a second, slightly different sense into the word the second time around.

The test for spotting it is simple. Is the same word coming back, separated by other words, doing more on its return than it did the first time? If the repetition is immediate (the word doubled with nothing between, as in "O Romeo, Romeo"), that's a different figure, epizeuxis. Ploce wants the gap.

The "special significance" part is what dictionaries that bother to be precise hold onto. Merriam-Webster's stock example, "a wife who was a wife indeed," works because the second "wife" doesn't just echo the first. It defines it, lifts it from the bare noun to the full idea of the thing. The word is the same; the weight is not.

Two sourced examples carry the figure:

• In Richard III (Shakespeare, c. 1593), Queen Margaret curses with "Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog!" and through the scene returns again and again to the word "hog," each return loading the slur heavier. The repetition is the point; the spacing is what makes it ploce rather than a single insult.
• "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14, KJV) repeats "am" across the short clause, the second instance turning the first into something closer to a definition of being itself. The word folds back on itself, which is exactly what the figure's name describes.

Did you know? "Ploce" comes from the Greek plokē, meaning "a plaiting" (from plekein, "to plait" or "braid"). The figure braids the repeated word back through the line, the way "I am that I am" loops the same word through the clause and ties it off on itself.

How Is Ploce Different From Traductio?

Ploce and traductio overlap so much that this is the question most people land on. Both are schemes that repeat a word through a passage. The split, where handbooks draw one, is about scope.

Traductio is the Roman umbrella term. It covers repeating a word across a passage whether or not the word changes form or sense between instances. Quintilian and the Latin rhetoricians used it broadly, which means it can stretch to include repetition that shifts grammatical form (lover, loving, loved) or shifts meaning outright. Ploce is usually narrowed: the same word, same form, returning with added emphasis or a shifted significance, but not a different grammatical shape.

Some sources skip the distinction entirely and treat the two as synonyms. That's not sloppiness so much as the honest state of the terms, which were never standardized the way later, narrower figures were.

Figure	What repeats	Whether the form or sense shifts	Sourced example
Traductio	A word, broadly, across a passage	May shift in form or sense; the umbrella term allows both	"Let love be without dissimulation... Be kindly affectioned one to another" carrying "love" through, including its inflected forms (Romans 12:9–10, KJV)
Ploce	The same word, same form, at intervals	Same form; emphasis or a shifted significance on return	"A wife who was a wife indeed" (cited in Merriam-Webster)

The practical line: if the word stays in the same form and just comes back harder or richer, you can call it ploce. If you want a term that also covers the word returning in a changed form, traductio is the wider net.

Is Ploce the Same as Antanaclasis or Polyptoton?

No, though ploce has stood in for both. The Silva Rhetoricae glossary flags ploce as a "general term" used in place of these narrower figures, which is most of why writers keep finding it tangled with them.

The difference is what happens to the repeated word on its return.

Antanaclasis is the case where the repeated word changes meaning outright. "Put out the light, and then put out the light" (Othello, in Othello, Shakespeare, c. 1603): the first "light" is the candle, the second is Desdemona's life. Same word, two different meanings. The reader sorting ploce from antanaclasis is really asking whether the meaning shifted fully or just gained emphasis.

Polyptoton is the case where the word returns in a changed grammatical form: a noun comes back as a verb, a present tense as a past. "The Greeks are strong, and skilful to their strength, / Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant" (Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare, c. 1602) turns "strong" into "strength," "skilful" into "skill." The root stays; the form moves. Telling ploce's plain repetition from polyptoton's change of form is the cleanest test of all, because it's purely about whether the word's ending changed.

So the three sort by what shifts. Ploce: nothing changes but the weight. Antanaclasis: the meaning changes. Polyptoton: the grammatical form changes.

Why Definitions of Ploce Disagree

You keep finding conflicting one-line definitions because ploce was never pinned down to one. It's a Renaissance-era catch-all, and the English rhetoricians who catalogued it disagreed with each other.

Peacham equated ploce with antanaclasis, treating the repeated word's change of meaning as the heart of it. Puttenham called it "the doubler," a looser sense closer to plain emphatic repetition. Day and others used it as a broad label for word-repetition generally. None of them was wrong by the standards of their own handbook; the term simply meant different things in different books, and that inheritance never got cleaned up.

Modern dictionaries flatten all of it back to "repetition of a word for emphasis," sometimes with the "special significance" or "extension of meaning" nuance attached, sometimes not. That's why one source tells you ploce is emphatic repetition and the next tells you it's repetition with a changed sense.

For practical use, work from the plain version: ploce is the general word for repeating a word at intervals for emphasis, with the door open to a shifted sense on the return. Reach for it when the repetition is straightforward emphasis and you don't need to be more specific. When something sharper is happening, name the narrower figure: antanaclasis when the meaning changes, polyptoton when the form changes. Ploce is the broad bucket, which is exactly why a writer who wants precision usually steps past it to the term that says more.