Polyptoton
The repetition of a word in different grammatical forms — 'love the loved', 'judged and judging'.
Polyptoton, from the Greek for 'many cases', is the rhetorical figure in which a writer repeats the same root word in different inflections within a short span. 'Absolute power corrupts absolutely' does it with an adjective and an adverb; 'the biter bit' does it with an active and a passive verb.
The figure produces two effects at once: emphasis (the repeated root drums the idea in) and turn (the change of form does subtle argumentative work, shifting the reader from actor to acted-upon, from noun to verb, from cause to effect). Lawyers and preachers use it constantly because it makes a claim feel both insistent and considered.
Polyptoton is close cousin to antanaclasis (same word, different meaning) and traductio (same word, same meaning, repeated). Where antanaclasis plays on a pun and traductio plays on emphasis, polyptoton plays on grammar — the reader hears the root twice while the syntax quietly rotates around it.
Common mistake: producing polyptoton by accident and calling it style. Repeating the root of a word without any grammatical or argumentative reason ('the decision was a decisive one, decisively made') is not polyptoton — it is verbal padding. The figure earns its keep only when the change in form does work the paraphrase would not.
“Not as a call to battle, though embattled we are.”
Keep reading the glossary
The repetition of a word within a short passage, with a different meaning each time.
The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the start of successive clauses.
A figure in which the same word or phrase begins and ends a clause or sentence.
An ABBA word-order reversal — 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'.