| Major division of a play, 5 of which make up a Shakespearean play | Act |
| Story, drama, or picture in which characters and events are symbols for expressing moral truths about life, as in a fable or parable. | Allegory |
| Device, commonly used in poetry, featuring the repetition of an initial sound in 2 or more words of a phrase such as “Round and round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran” | Alliteration |
| Main rival of the central character in a play or novel | Antagonist |
| Narrative poem with 2- to 4-line stanzas suitable for singing | Ballad |
| Pictorial or literary portrayal of an individual or object with characteristic features distorted or exaggerated for comic effect | Caricature |
| Decisive turning point of action in a drama | Climax |
| Type of drama that ends happily for the main character and is humorous or satiric in tone | Comedy |
| Two rhyming lines of poetry having the same length and meter | Couplet |
| Latin phrase for “god from the machine” for the literary device of resolving the conflicts of a plot by the intervention of outside or supernatural forces | Deus ex machina |
| Extended narrative poem in which action and characters are on a heroic leve | Epic |
| Short piece of writing expressing a personal opinion or observation | Essay |
| Brief story, often having animal characters, that ends with a moral, such as the ones written by Aesop | Fable |
| Story that involves beings and events that could not possibly exist in real life | Fantasy |
| Imaginative story about made-up or real people and events | Fiction. |
| Interruption of the action in a story to tell about something that happened earlier in time | Flashback |
| Poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme | Free verse |
| Japanese term for a 3-line verse consisting of 17 syllables | Haiku |
| Character who displays qualities such as courage and honesty | Hero |
| Extravagant exaggeration not meant to be taken literally | Hyperbole |
| Use of figurative language and descriptions to convey sense experience | Imagery |
| Use of words literally meaning the opposite of that intended | Irony |
| 5-line humorous or nonsense verse form described as the “only fixed verse form indigenous in the English language” | Limerick |
| Common figure of speech in which one thing is imaginatively compared to, or identified with, another unlike thing | Metaphor |
| Measured arrangement of stressed and unstressed words in a line of poetry | Meter |
| Person who tells the story in a work of fiction | Narrator |
| Writing that is factually true | Nonfiction |
| Long fictional prose narrative involving plot, characters, action, and theme | Novel |
| Use of words that sound like what they represent such as bang, zap, and hum | Onomatopoeia |
| Short, fictitious story illustrating a moral or religious truth | Parable |
| Humorous imitation of a literary or artistic work | Parody |
| Figure of speech giving an animal, an abstract idea, or an inanimate object the characteristics of humans | Personification |
| Use of another’s ideas or words as one’s own, especially without credit | Plagiarism |
| Word other than dramatist that specifically designates an author who writes plays | Playwright |
| Structure of a story | Plot |
| All writing that is not poetry | Prose |
| Central character, whether a hero or a villain, in a play or novel | Protagonis |
| Pen name | Pseudonym |
| Play on words | Pun |
| Word, phrase, line or group of lines regularly repeated in a poem | Refrain |
| Writing that pokes fun at human follies in order to bring about a change | Satire |
| Division of an act in a play | Scene |
| Place or period in which the action of a play or novel takes place | Setting |
| Figure of speech that uses like or as to compare 2 different objects or actions | Simile |
| 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter and having a definite rhyme scheme | Sonnet |
| Segment or division of a poem | Stanza |
| 2-word alliterative term designating a story that depends on exaggeration for its effect | Tall tale |
| Type of drama that presents the fall of a protagonist through some weakness of character or error in judgment | Tragedy |
| Line of poetry, stanza of a poem, or poetry in general | Verse |