Topos

//ˈtɒpɒs// noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A literary theme or motif; a rhetorical convention or formula.

    "The ritual of weighing the soul was an iconographic topos familiar to Christianity from the ceremony of the weighing of sins at the Last Judgement."

  2. 2
    a traditional theme or motif or literary convention wordnet
  3. 3
    A category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space (or, more generally, on a site).
  4. 4
    A toilet. slang

Example

More examples

"The ritual of weighing the soul was an iconographic topos familiar to Christianity from the ceremony of the weighing of sins at the Last Judgement."

Etymology

From Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “place”). Compare topic.

Related phrases

cartesian closed categorysubobject classifier

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.