Repetition in literature is the deliberate reuse of a word, phrase, sound or sentence structure, close enough together that the reader notices the pattern. Writers repeat to emphasize an idea, to give prose or verse a rhythm, to make a line memorable and to mark change: when a phrase comes back, the reader measures what has happened since it last appeared.
Editors also mark repetition in drafts, so it helps to keep two kinds apart. Deliberate repetition is a device with a dozen named forms, from anaphora to refrain. Accidental repetition is the same word twice in a paragraph for no reason. Most of the named types are defined by where the repeat falls. If you're revising a draft rather than analyzing a text, start with accidental echoes.
Types of repetition at a glance
Most of the Greek names describe where the repeated words fall. Once you can see the position, the name follows. The last two, polyptoton and sound repetition, are named for what repeats rather than where.
| Type | Where the repeat falls | Example |
|---|---|---|
| TypeAnaphora | Where the repeat fallsAt the start of successive clauses | Example“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river…” (Dickens) |
| TypeEpistrophe | Where the repeat fallsAt the end of successive clauses | Example“of the people, by the people, for the people” (Lincoln) |
| TypeSymploce | Where the repeat fallsAt both the start and the end | Example“Are they Hebrews? so am I.” (2 Corinthians) |
| TypeAnadiplosis | Where the repeat fallsEnd of one clause, start of the next | Example“Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know” (Sidney) |
| TypeEpanalepsis | Where the repeat fallsStart and end of the same clause | Example“blood will have blood” (Macbeth) |
| TypeAntimetabole | Where the repeat fallsThe same words, in reverse order | Example“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Macbeth) |
| TypeEpizeuxis | Where the repeat fallsBack to back, nothing between | Example“Break, break, break” (Tennyson) |
| TypeDiacope | Where the repeat fallsWith a word or two between | Example“To be, or not to be” (Hamlet) |
| TypeRefrain | Where the repeat fallsA line that returns at intervals | Example“Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’” (Poe) |
| TypeParallelism | Where the repeat fallsThe same grammatical structure | Example“A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes) |
| TypePolyptoton | Where the repeat fallsOne root in different forms | Example“Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (Sonnet 116) |
| TypeSound repetition | Where the repeat fallsConsonants, vowels or rhymes | Example“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew” (Coleridge) |
Repetition at the start and end
These three devices repeat words in the same place in each clause, so the reader learns the pattern quickly and hears every return of it.
1. Anaphora
The same word or phrase at the start of successive clauses or sentences. It builds momentum and signals that a series is coming. It is a staple of speeches, and it works in prose as well.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
Because “fog” comes first, every new place (up the river, down the river) arrives already inside it. The repeat sets the frame, and the rest of each clause brings the news. Clause after clause, the fog fills London, and the novel, which is about a lawsuit nobody can see through. Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) the same way, with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” anaphora and antithesis at once.
2. Epistrophe
The mirror image: the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses. The end of a clause is where the stress falls, so epistrophe drives the repeated word home.
that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Here the change comes first (of, by, for) and the repeat lands last, in the stressed position, so “people” is the word the audience hears at the end of each phrase. Lincoln could have written “popular government.” Repeating “people” three times turns an abstraction into a crowd.
3. Symploce
Anaphora and epistrophe together: the same words open and close each clause, with something new in the middle. It is rarer, and in an argument it can make a point feel unanswerable.
Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? so am I.
Paul is answering rivals who boast about their credentials. Each boast gets the same three-word reply, and the boasting collapses.
Repetition that links and loops
These devices repeat a word in a new position, so the sentence seems to turn back on itself or pass the word along like a baton.
4. Anadiplosis
The last word of one clause becomes the first word of the next. Each idea seems to follow from the one before, which suits a chain of cause and effect.
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain
Pleasure leads to reading, reading to knowledge, knowledge to pity, pity to grace: the chain reaction the poet hopes his sonnets will set off in the woman he loves.
5. Epanalepsis
The same word at the beginning and end of one clause. The clause closes where it opened, which makes it sound like a law or a verdict.
It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Macbeth, after the murdered Banquo's ghost appears at the feast. The phrase loops back on itself the way violence does in the play. A gentler example is Philippians 4:4 in the King James Bible: “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.”
6. Antimetabole
Words repeated in reverse order, A B then B A. It is a strict form of chiasmus, which the rhetorical devices list covers with a famous political example. The reversal makes the second half sound like proof of the first, or like the world turning upside down.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
The witches reverse the words, and the rest of the play reverses the moral order.
Repetition side by side
The bluntest kinds of repetition put the same word side by side, or nearly so. They are the easiest to overuse, so save them for a moment that has earned them.
7. Epizeuxis
One word repeated immediately, with nothing in between. In grief it can sound like the only word left. Played for comedy, it can sound like boredom or mockery.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
Tennyson wrote it after the death of his closest friend. The waves keep breaking, and the poem keeps the beat. John Milton does the same for a blinded hero in Samson Agonistes (1671): “O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.” For the comic version, there is Hamlet answering Polonius, who asks what he is reading: “Words, words, words.”
8. Diacope
A word repeated with a word or two in between. The gap gives the second appearance more weight than an immediate repeat would.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
Each “and” stretches the line, so the days drag the way Macbeth says they do. Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” is a diacope too, and one of the most quoted lines in English.
Repetition across a passage
These two work over a longer stretch: a line that returns at intervals, or a sentence shape that repeats from clause to clause.
9. Refrain
A line or phrase that returns at intervals, usually at the end of a stanza. Each return means a little more, because of what the stanza before it added. Some forms are built on refrains: a villanelle has nineteen lines and two refrains that alternate, then meet in the final couplet.
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
At first the word is just the bird's name, or the only word it knows. By the end it answers every question the grieving speaker asks, and the answer is always no. Walt Whitman's “O Captain! My Captain!” (1865) ends each of its three stanzas on “fallen cold and dead,” and Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott” keeps returning to the name “Shalott” at the end of its stanzas.
10. Parallelism
Repetition of structure rather than words: clauses with the same grammatical shape. The matching frames tell the reader the items belong together, and a change in the last one stands out.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
The frame “a time to” repeats, and the content swings between opposites. Shylock's speech in The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597) uses a parallel frame to build an argument and then turn it: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Repetition of roots and sounds
The last two are named for what repeats rather than where: a word's root in different forms, or a sound rather than a whole word.
11. Polyptoton
The same root in different grammatical forms: love and loving, alter and alteration. It lets a writer test a word against its own relatives.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
Love and love, alters and alteration, remover and remove. Each pair defines real love by what it refuses to do.
12. Sound repetition
Repeated sounds rather than whole words: alliteration (the same consonant at the start of nearby words), assonance (the same vowel), consonance (the same consonant inside or at the end of words) and rhyme.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
The f and b sounds and the internal rhyme of “blew” and “flew” make the ship pick up speed in your ear. At the far end of sound play is Gertrude Stein's “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” from her poem “Sacred Emily” (written 1913, published 1922), where repetition empties a word and fills it up again.
Repetition in speeches
Listeners can't reread, so speeches usually repeat more than writing meant for the page. A repeated phrase tells the audience where they are in the argument and gives them something to carry out of the room. Lincoln stacks three verbs at Gettysburg: “we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.” The most famous modern examples are built the same way, with a phrase that returns as an anchor. See the analyses of “I Have a Dream” and “We shall fight on the beaches” for anaphora at full stretch, and persuasive techniques for where repetition sits among the other tools of argument.
Two habits keep spoken repetition from turning into a chant. Threes are the usual unit, because three feels complete; longer runs, like the dream passage in Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, hold up when each return adds something. And let something change each time: a bigger claim, a new name, a sharper image. If the repeated line has nothing new around it, the audience tends to stop hearing it.
Deliberate repetition vs accidental echoes
Every draft repeats words by accident. Editors call these echoes: the same distinctive word twice in a few lines, three sentences in a row opening with “She,” the same bit of information given in chapter two and again in chapter four. Readers may not name the problem, but they often feel the prose go flat.
One test settles most cases. Say what the second appearance does that the first didn't: emphasis, rhythm, a link or a change all count. If you can't name a job, it's an echo.
Deliberate repetition
- Does a job: emphasis, rhythm, linking or contrast
- Falls in a pattern the reader can hear, often three
- Something changes around each return
- Sits where the reader will hear it, often the start or end of a clause
Accidental echo
- Has no job; the writer just reached for the same word
- Appears at random, two or five lines apart
- Says the same thing again in the same way
- Hides in the middle of a sentence, where it reads as clumsiness
Before. The kitchen was quiet. Nadia sat at the kitchen table and listened to the quiet hum of the fridge. She felt suddenly that the quiet was waiting for her to speak.
After. Nadia sat at the kitchen table. Nothing moved except the hum of the fridge, and the room seemed to be waiting for her to speak.
The first version uses “kitchen” twice and “quiet” three times, none of them on purpose. The revision cuts a sentence, shows the quiet instead of naming it, and drops “suddenly,” which was doing nothing.
To find and fix echoes in your own draft:
- Read it aloud. The ear catches a repeated word the eye skips.
- Search for your own crutch words. Everyone has a few: “just,” “really,” “suddenly,” “almost,” a favorite verb. Search the chapter for each and look at the clusters.
- Check sentence openings. Three sentences starting with the same word, or the same shape, in a row is an echo even if the words differ.
- Cut before you replace. The second instance can often go, or two sentences can become one. Swap in a synonym only when it means exactly the same thing.
That last point matters more than it looks. H. W. and F. G. Fowler, in The King's English (1906), named the opposite fault “elegant variation”: changing a word every time it appears just to avoid repeating it. A detective who becomes “the sleuth,” then “the investigator,” then “the veteran officer” leaves readers wondering whether three people are in the room. In technical, legal and academic writing the rule is firmer still. If a document says “contract” on page one, it should not say “agreement” on page three unless it means a different document. Repeating a key term is how the reader knows it is the same thing.
For a second pair of eyes, ask the Strokes Assistant to review a chapter for repetition, then put each word or sentence opening it lists through the test above.
Practice: name the repetition
Name the device in each line before you check the answers.
- “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die” (Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 1854)
- “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!” (Coleridge)
- “But O heart! heart! heart!” (Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”)
- “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.” (Coleridge)
- “We came for the music, we stayed for the music, and we left humming the music.”
- “The more she saved, the less she spent; the less she spent, the more she worried.”
- “He was a builder who built nothing he couldn't rebuild.”
- “Ask what you know, then know what you ask.”
Answers. 1 is anaphora. 2 is epanalepsis, since the first line begins and ends with “alone,” with epizeuxis inside it (“all, all,” “wide wide”), and the second line picks “alone” up again, which is anadiplosis. 3 is epizeuxis. 4 is epizeuxis too, and in the poem the line “Water, water, every where” comes twice in the same stanza. 5 is epistrophe. 6 is anadiplosis: the end of the first clause opens the second. 7 is polyptoton (builder, built, rebuild). 8 is antimetabole. Lines 5 to 8 are original examples.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between anaphora and epistrophe?
Position. Anaphora repeats a word or phrase at the start of successive clauses, as in Dickens's "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river," so the repeat sets a frame and the new material follows. Epistrophe repeats it at the end, as in Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, for the people," so the repeat lands last, where the stress falls. Both together is symploce.
Does anaphora have another meaning?
Yes. In grammar and linguistics, anaphora means a word that refers back to something already mentioned, usually a pronoun: in "Maya lost her keys," "her" points back to Maya. That sense has nothing to do with the rhetorical device. In writing about literature or speeches, anaphora means repeating the opening words of successive clauses.
Is repetition bad in writing?
Not in itself. Deliberate repetition is one of the oldest tools in poetry and rhetoric. An accidental echo, the same distinctive word twice in a few lines for no reason, tends to flatten prose. Ask what the second appearance adds. If nothing, cut or restructure rather than swapping in a synonym, and keep key terms in technical writing the same.
