RRhetoric
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Omission & Flow

Polysyndeton

pah-lee-SIN-duh-ton / ˌpɒlɪˈsɪndətɒn

Using more connecting words than needed — and… and… and. Every item gets equal weight, and the series feels relentless. The effect can be biblical, breathless, or exhausted, depending on what is stacked.

"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house…" — Matthew 7:25

Don't confuse it with Asyndeton, Parataxis. Asyndeton deletes the connectives instead. Parataxis is the broader habit of coordination over subordination; polysyndeton is its most audible form.

Drill this device — 29 excerptsForge one yourself →

In the Reader — 29 excerpts

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet · open the passage →
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet · open the passage →
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth · open the passage →
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
— John Milton, Paradise Lost · open the passage →
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese · open the passage →
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
She had read Paul and Virginia, and she had dreamed of the little bamboo house, the negro Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear …
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary · open the passage →
The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace · open the passage →
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass · open the passage →
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · open the passage →
I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.
— Henrik Ibsen, Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House) · open the passage →
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
— Robert Frost, North of Boston · open the passage →
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man · open the passage →
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man · open the passage →
costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence · open the passage →
to. He profiled directly in front of the bull, drew the sword out of the folds of the muleta and sighted along the blade.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises · open the passage →
were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury · open the passage →
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms · open the passage →
was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye · open the passage →
nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man · open the passage →
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea · open the passage →
…mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road · open the passage →

…and 5 more. Meet the rest in the quiz →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with polysyndeton most often — company reveals character.

Anaphora 24 Litotes 11 Parallelism 9 Chiasmus 9 Metaphor 8 Asyndeton 8 Parataxis 7 Antithesis 7

The rest of the family

Asyndeton Ellipsis Brachylogia Aposiopesis Enjambment