Prosopopoeia
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An act of personifying a person or object when communicating to an audience; a figure of speech involving this. countable, rhetoric, uncountable
"Of the prosopopœia or personification, there are two kinds: one when action and character are attributed to fictitious, irrational, or even inanimate objects; the others, when a probable but fictitious speech is assigned to a real character."
- 2 representing an abstract quality or idea as a person or creature wordnet
- 3 The personification of an abstraction. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"Of the prosopopœia or personification, there are two kinds: one when action and character are attributed to fictitious, irrational, or even inanimate objects; the others, when a probable but fictitious speech is assigned to a real character."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek προσωποποιία (prosōpopoiía, “dramatization, the putting of speeches into the mouths of characters”). By surface analysis, prosopo- + -poeia.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.