Synchysis
Interlocking word order — an ABAB arrangement that braids two ideas together.
Synchysis is an interlocked word order in which paired terms alternate rather than sit together: adjective A, adjective B, noun A, noun B. In Latin verse the pattern is common enough to have a nickname, the 'golden line', and it exploits the freedom of an inflected language where endings, not position, show what goes with what.
In English the device is harder and rarer, because word order carries grammatical meaning. English writers approximate it with balanced interleaving — 'the cold hand, the warm word; the warm hand, the cold word' — or by separating an adjective from its noun across a phrase for deliberate suspension.
Compare chiasmus, which is ABBA: chiasmus closes a shape, synchysis keeps two threads running in parallel. Where chiasmus feels like a door shutting, synchysis feels woven, which is why classical poets used it for lines about mingling, confusion, or entanglement.
Common mistake: labelling any unusual word order synchysis. Displacement for emphasis alone is hyperbaton or anastrophe; synchysis requires the specific interleaved pairing.
“aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem”
Keep reading the glossary
An ABBA word-order reversal — 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'.
A figure that displaces a word from its expected position for emphasis or rhythm — 'This I must see.'
A rhetorical figure that inverts normal word order for emphasis, formality, or characterisation.
A rhetorical scheme in which successive clauses have the same length and grammatical structure.