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A literary trope is an artistic effect realized with figurative language — word, phrase, image — such as a rhetorical figure.[1] In editorial practice, a trope is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase".[2] Semantic change has expanded the definition of the literary term trope to also describe a writer's usage of commonly recurring or overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations)[3][4][5], motifs, and clichés in a work of creative literature.[6][7]