syllepsis

n., pl. -ses (-sēz).

A construction in which a word governs two or more other words but agrees in number, gender, or case with only one, or has a different meaning when applied to each of the words, as in He lost his coat and his temper.

[Late Latin syllēpsis, from Greek sullēpsis : sun-, syn- + lēpsis, a taking (from lambanein, to take).]

sylleptic syl·lep'tic (-lĕp'tĭk) adj.

syllepsis, a construction in which one word (usually a verb or preposition) is applied to two other words or phrases, either ungrammatically or in two differing senses. In the first case, the verb or preposition agrees grammatically with only one of the two elements which it governs, e.g. ‘He works his work, I mine’ (Tennyson). In the second case, the word also appears only once but is applied twice in differing senses (often an abstract sense and a concrete sense), as in Pope's The Rape of the Lock:

Here, thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.

A more far‐fetched instance occurs in Dickens's Pickwick Papers when it is said of a character that she ‘went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair’. There is usually a kind of pun involved in this kind of syllepsis. The term is frequently used interchangeably with zeugma, attempts to distinguish the two terms having foundered in confusion: some rhetoricians place the ungrammatical form under the heading of syllepsis while others allot it to zeugma. It seems preferable to keep zeugma as the more inclusive term for syntactic ‘yoking’ and to reserve syllepsis for its ungrammatical or punning varieties.

Adjective: sylleptic.

syllēpsis (‘taking together’), figure of speech in which one word is applied to two others in different senses, e.g. ‘he bolted the door and his dinner’; thus in Tacitus Annals 2. 29: manus ac supplices voces … tendens, ‘raising hands and voices in supplication’. It was sometimes called zeugma.

A type of zeugma in which a single word, usually a verb or adjective, agrees grammatically with two or more other words, but semantically with only one, thereby effecting a shift in sense with the other, as in "colder than ice and a usurer's heart."

IN BRIEF: n. - Use of a word to govern two or more words though agreeing in number or case etc. with only one.

Tutor's tip: This was the winning word in the 1958 National Spelling Bee!