How Many Figures of Speech Are There?
There is no correct number. The honest answer is a range: about 5 everyday figures everyone learns, roughly 30 that a real English course expects you to name, and well over 200 in the classical rhetoric catalogue. The count you get is a choice about where to draw the line.
What most people mean by "figure of speech" — the handful taught first in school.
Same language, four honest answers. The number is a definition, not a fact.
Why the number keeps changing
Ask a primary-school teacher and the answer is five. Ask a literature examiner and it is closer to thirty. Ask a Renaissance rhetorician and you would be handed a book. All three are right, because “figure of speech” is a category with a soft edge: it stretches from the half-dozen everyone uses without thinking to a specialist vocabulary built up over two thousand years.
The Roman teacher Quintilian was already sorting and naming figures in the first century, in his teaching manual the Institutio Oratoria. By the late Renaissance the catalogue had exploded: Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577) named around 180 separate figures, each with its own Greek or Latin label. Most have since fallen out of use, which is exactly why no one can give you a single tidy total.
Schemes and tropes: the only split that matters
The one division worth learning is the ancient one. A scheme changes the arrangement of words but leaves their meaning alone — anaphora, for instance, opens several clauses the same way (“we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds…”). A trope changes the meaning of a word: a metaphor calls one thing another, irony says the opposite of what it means.
Almost every figure people name in ordinary conversation — metaphor, simile, hyperbole, irony, metonymy — is a trope. The schemes are the quieter half, the patterns of repetition and inversion that make a sentence land. Once you can sort a figure into one bucket or the other, the 200-strong catalogue stops looking like a list to memorise and starts looking like two simple ideas with a lot of named variations.
The figurative-language cluster
Each figure below gets its own page — what it is, how it works, and a run of worked examples you can actually use. Pages still being written are marked “in the works”; the rest are live.
Sources
- Gideon O. Burton, Silva Rhetoricae (“The Forest of Rhetoric”), Brigham Young University — the standard online catalogue of figures, listing well over 200 with their scheme/trope classification.
- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (c. 95 CE), Books VIII–IX — the foundational Roman treatment of tropes and figures.
- Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577) — a Renaissance rhetoric manual cataloguing roughly 180 figures, a high-water mark for the naming tradition.
- Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 1999) — the modern textbook treatment of the scheme/trope division.
Rhetoric spent two thousand years giving names to the things language does on its own — which is why the only wrong answer to “how many?” is a single number.