topos

1. 1.

   a traditional theme or motif or literary convention

   “James Joyce uses the topos of the Wandering Jew in his Ulysses”

   Broadertheme

Other forms of topos

plural

topoi

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.

Questions about topos

What does topos mean?

topos means "a traditional theme or motif or literary convention".

How many syllables are in topos?

topos has 2 syllables: to-pos. The stress falls on "to".

Is topos a common word?

topos is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.