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Syllable division and stress derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
litotes is a noun meaning "understatement for rhetorical effect (especially when expressing an affirmative by negating its contrary)". It carries one recorded sense.
understatement for rhetorical effect (especially when expressing an affirmative by negating its contrary)
“saying `I was not a little upset' when you mean `I was very upset' is an example of litotes”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for litotes come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.