Enargeia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Vivid and striking description that makes a scene seem present before the eyes ; the quality of palpable clarity and reality achieved in speech, writing or art
2. A rhetorical vividness that renders images so sharply they seem real to the reader or listener ; the lifelike intensity and palpable clarity of a work of art or language
3. Graphic, lifelike depiction that vividly places a scene before the mind ; the energy and palpable immediacy that such depiction gives to rhetoric or painting

Etymology: Enargeia comes from ancient Greek "enargeia," meaning "clearness" or "vividness," from "enargēs," "visible, manifest," literally "in the light" (from "en," "in," and "argos," "bright" or "shining"). Greek rhetoricians used it for a technique: describing something so concretely that the listener seems to see it before their eyes. Aristotle touched on the idea in his "Rhetoric," and later writers such as Quintilian and the author of the "Progymnasmata" tradition treated it as a formal device. The word remained largely a technical term of classical rhetoric and literary criticism. English took it directly from Greek in the 19th century as a scholarly term, so it stayed mostly confined to discussions of style and to the study of ancient writing rather than passing into everyday speech.

Synonyms: vividness, vivid description