Who knows why we call it figurative language?
Because you have to figure out what it means!

Peggy Smith: Cut out newspaper headlines and titles of articles- especially from the sports section. Paste them on a posterboard and number them. Have students identify the figure of speech by number and explain in concrete terms what the line is saying. Some examples from today's Plain Dealer: 'Buckeyes clip ice-cold Gophers', 'New Crop of Garden Catalogs', 'The Heat is Back on Steel Makers'. These are pretty lame, but usually there are some good pickings in the daily newspaper.

Allegory
Alliteration
Allusion
Amplification
Anagram
Analogy
Anaphora
anastrophe
Anthropomorphism
Animal related words
Antithesis
Aphorism
Apostrophe/Authorial Intrusion
Archetype
Assonance
Asyndeton
Bibliomancy
Bildungsroman
Cacophony
Caesura
Characterization
Chiasmus
Circumlocution
Conflict
Connotation
Consonance
Denotation
Deus ex Machina
Diction
Doppelganger
Ekphrastic
Emulation
Epilogue
Epithet
Euphemism
Euphony
Faulty Parallelism
Flashback
Foil
Foreshadowing
Hyperbation
Hyperbole
Imagery
Internal Rhyme
Inversion
Irony
Juxtaposition
Kennings
Malapropism
Metaphor
Metonymy
Motif
Mood
Negative Capability
Nemesis
Onomatopoeia
Oxymoron
Paradox
Pathetic Fallacy
Periphrasis
Periodic Structure
Personification
Point of View
Plot
Polysyndeton
Portmanteau
Prologue
Puns
Rhyme Scheme
Rhythm