// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did the trope say? "I'm a cliché.

A trope in its original sense is any instance of figurative (non-literal) language, such as a metaphor, hyperbole, or personification. It has also broadened to mean any commonly recurring idea, phrase, image, artistic technique, artistic element, or cliché.

Arts, literature, and communication

• Literary device, any intentional or special use of language
• Narrative device, any intentional technique for conveying a story
  • Genre trope, or genre convention, a recurring element that traditionally appears across various stories
    • Fantasy trope, any common element across works of the fantasy genre
    • Trope (cinema), any common convention or technique used in filmmaking
  • Plot device, any technique that drives a story's plot forward
  • Motif (narrative), any recurring element within one particular story
• Trope (music), an addition to a piece of medieval music
• Trope (politics), the common use of a particular biased narrative or message for political purposes

Philosophy and religion

• Trope (philosophy), any of various technical terms in philosophy
• Hebrew cantillation, trope, or trop, the chanting of readings from the Hebrew Bible

Science and technology

• Trope (mathematics), an archaic geometry term for a tangent line or plane
• Tropidophiidae, or tropes, a family of dwarf boa snakes
• Tropes Zoom, a desktop search-engine software

People

• Michael Trope (born 1951), American trial lawyer and former sports agent

See also

• All pages with titles containing Trope
• TV Tropes, a wiki for conventions and devices found within creative works