Zeugma
Quick answer: Zeugma is a figure of speech in which one word, usually a verb, governs two or more others in different senses. Definition, examples and writing advice.
Zeugma is a figure of speech in which a single word, most often a verb, governs two or more other words while applying to each in a different sense. The classic shape is a sentence like 'She lost her keys and her temper', where 'lost' works literally on the keys and figuratively on the temper. The word comes from the Greek for 'yoking': one verb yoked to two unequal partners.
Poets and prose stylists love zeugma because it delivers wit, economy and surprise in a single stroke. It forces two categories of experience, usually one physical and one emotional or abstract, to share a grammar, and the collision tells the reader something the two halves could not say separately. It is a favourite tool of satirists, but it turns up in quiet lyric poems too.
How It Works
The engine of zeugma is a shift in meaning across a shared word. Take an original example: 'He carried the coffin and the conversation.' The verb 'carried' means physical bearing in the first case and social effort in the second. Reading the line, you process the verb twice, and the small jolt between readings is the pleasure of the device.
Zeugma works best when the two yoked objects sit at different levels: concrete and abstract, trivial and grave, public and private. 'She packed her suitcase and her doubts' lands because luggage and doubt do not normally travel in the same clause. If both objects take the verb in the same sense, you have ordinary coordination, not zeugma.
Where You Will See It
Alexander Pope is the standard reference. 'The Rape of the Lock' repeatedly yokes the weighty to the trivial, letting a queen take counsel and tea in a single breath, and letting a heroine risk her honour or her gown. That levelling of great and small is Pope's entire satirical argument compressed into grammar. Charles Dickens used the device constantly in prose, and modern songwriters still lean on it for one-line wit.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Decide first what the mismatch should mean. In satire, yoking the solemn to the silly deflates the solemn. In elegy, yoking an object to an emotion can make grief feel physical: 'We buried the dog and the argument.' The device is compact, so one strong zeugma per poem usually outperforms three clever ones.
Watch your verb. It must plausibly take both objects, one literally and one figuratively, without strain. If readers have to stop and puzzle out the grammar, the wit dies on the table.
What poets can take from this
- Yoke a concrete object to an abstract one for maximum contrast.
- Choose verbs with well-worn figurative uses (carry, lose, hold, break) so both senses feel natural.
- Use zeugma sparingly; it is a spotlight, not a wallpaper.
- In satire, put the trivial item last so the sentence deflates at the end.
- Read the line aloud to check the verb genuinely fits both objects.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of 8 to 12 lines about leaving a house for the last time, in which at least two lines use zeugma to yoke a physical object to a feeling or memory.
Questions
What is the difference between zeugma and syllepsis?
Usage varies and the terms are genuinely contested. Many handbooks treat them as synonyms; others reserve syllepsis for the case where the shared word changes meaning between its objects, and zeugma for any shared-word construction. If you use one term consistently and define it, no reasonable reader will object.
Is zeugma only good for comedy?
No. Comedy is its most famous register, thanks to Pope, but the same yoking can carry grief or tenderness. A line that packs a suitcase and a regret in one verb can be quietly devastating rather than funny.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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