Polyptoton

Takeaways

• It can create wit, emphasis, irony, or conceptual pressure.
• The changed grammatical form should do real semantic work.
• If forced, it sounds like wordplay pasted onto the sentence.

Overview

Polyptoton repeats words derived from the same root in different forms. It lets the prose worry a concept from multiple grammatical angles: act and actor, love and lover, judge and judgement.

Examples

• He judged the judges by their eagerness to judge.
• The promise promised less each time she repeated it.