Periphrasis
Quick answer: Periphrasis is a roundabout way of naming something, using many words where one would do. Learn how poets use circumlocution for effect, not evasion.
Periphrasis is the use of a longer, roundabout expression in place of a shorter, direct one: 'the author of Paradise Lost' for Milton, 'the wet season of the year' for winter, 'he was economical with the truth' for he lied. The Greek name means 'speaking around', and its plain English twin is circumlocution. One thing gets many words instead of its one word.
That sounds like a vice, and often it is: bureaucratic prose runs on periphrasis to avoid saying anything plainly. But poetry has used the device seriously for two thousand years, to dignify, to riddle, to avoid a worn word, or to describe a thing so freshly that its ordinary name would be a loss. The Old English kenning, calling the sea the whale-road, is periphrasis compressed into a compound.
How It Works
Periphrasis substitutes description for naming. The reader must reconstruct the referent from the description, and that small act of solving creates engagement, ceremony or suspense. Eighteenth-century poetic diction institutionalised the move, calling fish 'the finny tribe', which is exactly the mannerism later poets rebelled against. The device turns sour when the description is less interesting than the name it replaces.
An invented example: instead of 'my phone', a poem might say 'the small lit stone that knows where everyone is'. The periphrasis makes a familiar object strange again, which is one of poetry's oldest jobs.
Where You Will See It
Homer's formulaic epithets, rosy-fingered dawn standing in for sunrise, are periphrasis in ceremonial dress. Anglo-Saxon verse built kennings for sea, sword and king. Eighteenth-century poets like James Thomson elaborated natural description through learned circumlocution, and the Romantics pruned it back. Riddle poems are pure periphrasis, an entire text speaking around a withheld name. In prose, euphemistic officialese ('collateral damage') shows the same mechanism serving concealment rather than wonder.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Use periphrasis when the direct name is worn smooth or emotionally blocked. Grief poems often circle the word 'dead' for whole stanzas, and the circling is honest, since that is how grieving speech behaves. Use it for defamiliarisation, describing an ordinary thing as if no name existed. Two cautions: the roundabout phrase must be better than the name, more precise or more alive, and one strong periphrasis outperforms five ornamental ones. If a contest judge can feel you avoiding a simple word for no reason, the device has failed; if they feel the word being rediscovered, it has done its work.
What poets can take from this
- Replace a name only when your description beats it for precision or surprise.
- Try writing about an object without its name once per draft as a seeing exercise.
- Let emotionally loaded poems circle their key word, then decide whether to land on it.
- Cut any periphrasis that exists to sound poetic rather than to see freshly.
- Study kennings and riddle poems for compressed, muscular circumlocution.
Try it yourself
Write a riddle poem of eight to twelve lines describing an everyday object entirely through periphrasis, never using its name or any part of its name. Make every roundabout phrase earn its place, then use the object's plain name as the title.
Questions
What is the difference between periphrasis and euphemism?
Both avoid a direct word, but for different reasons. Euphemism substitutes a milder expression to soften something taboo or painful, like 'passed away'. Periphrasis is any roundabout expression, whatever the motive: ceremony, freshness, riddling or evasion. Every euphemism of the wordy kind is periphrasis, but not the reverse.
Is a kenning a form of periphrasis?
Yes. A kenning like 'whale-road' for the sea is a compact, formulaic periphrasis inherited from Old Norse and Old English verse. It names a thing through a two-part description instead of its ordinary word.
When is periphrasis a fault?
When the roundabout phrase is duller, vaguer or more pompous than the plain word, as in officialese and padded student essays. The test in poetry is simple: if the description does not see the thing better than its name does, use the name.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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