From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishtropetrope /trəʊp $ troʊp/ noun [countable] technicalSLAL words, phrases, images etc that are used for an unusual or interesting effect cinematic tropes
Examples from the Corpus
trope• Knowledge of their ontological status thus functions in Textermination as a trope for indeterminacy.• In effect, Freud attributes to the unconscious the power of a writer brilliantly deploying the classical tropes to transform his material.• The movement was also programmatically self-conscious, one of the modernist tropes.• Brooke-Rose reverses this familiar postmodernist trope by focusing instead on the relation between the characters and their readers.Origin trope (1500-1600) Latin tropus, from Greek tropos “turn, way, style”, from trepein “to turn” 