Figure Name antiprosopopoeia
Source Silva Rhetoricae (; Macbeth (1876) ("anti-personification"); Bullinger (1898) ("antiprosopopoeia; or, anti-personification")
Earliest Source None
Synonyms anti-personification, antipersonification, antiprosopopoeia
Etymology anti "opposite" prefixed, hence, opposite of prosopopoeia
Type Trope
Linguistic Domain Semantic

1. The representation of persons as inanimate objects.
This inversion of prosopopoeia or personification can simply be the use of a metaphor to depict or describe a person. (Silva Rhetoricae)

2. Anti-Personification. To show, curiously, with what opposite instruments the mind can work, let us observe that to represent a person as a thing may energetically lower or ridicule; as when, of John Gilpin, Cowper says at a critical moment of the hero's equestrian experience:
"The horse who never in such sort
Had handled been before,
What thing upon its back had got
Did wonder more and more." (Macbeth)

3. The opposite of Prosopopoeia; Persons represented as inanimate things... The name is given to this figure because it is the opposite of the other: "persons being represented as things," instead of things as persons. (Bullinger, 854)


1. She was a doormat upon which the tread of too many boots had scraped. (Silva Rhetoricae)

2. "How, in the name of soldiership and sense,
Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth
And tender as a girl, all essenced o'er
With odors, and as profligate as sweet,
Who sell their laurel for a myrtle wreath,
And love when they should fight; when such as these
Presume to lay their hands upon the ark
Of her magnificent and awful cause?"
- Wordsworth (Macbeth)

3. 2 Sam. 16:9. -"Then said Abishai the son of Zeruiah unto the king. Why should this dead dog curse thy lord, the king? let me go over, I pray thee, and take off his head." (Bullinger, 854)

Kind Of Identity
Part Of
Related Figures personification, prosopopoeia
Confidence Unconfident
Last Editor Ioanna Malton
Confidence Unconfident
Editorial Notes
Reviewed No