# Paronomasia **Domain:** Rhetoric / Language / Poetics **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Paronomasia** is the rhetorical term for wordplay that exploits similar sounds, including the pun. Poets, prophets, and orators across cultures have used it to bind ideas together through sound, and scripture in several languages is rich with it. [[wiki/Ferdinand de Saussure|Ferdinand de Saussure]] spent years, roughly 1906 to 1909, in notebooks hunting hidden anagrams of names within Latin verse, convinced that poets wove key words into the sounds of their lines. The literary scholar Jean Starobinski published these studies in 1971 as *Les mots sous les mots* (*Words upon Words*). ## Relationships - **Related practices:** [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]] · [[wiki/Folk Etymology|Folk Etymology]]. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - Jean Starobinski, *Les mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure* (Gallimard, 1971). ## See Also [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]] · [[wiki/Phonosemantics|Phonosemantics]]