There are all kinds of little known literary terms. I feel we (as writers) should know them, or at least carry a few up our sleeves to pull out and amaze others upon occasion. I ran into such a term (a word actually) on Dragon Writing Prompts.
Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated. Definition from Wikipedia.
Some examples are: artsy-fartsy, razzle-dazzle, hobnob and hocus-pocus.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
loosey goosey? cutie patootie? Does the spelling have to be identical?
Twitter: thatgrrl
March 3, 2009 at
I think the spelling does have to be close, but not identical. I’ve been looking for a site with more literary type terms to find more of this. We see things like that and don’t know there is a word for it. Not that I have any hope to remember them all but one or two might sink in.