Litotes

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In rhetoric, litotes is a figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. The literal meaning of a litotes is "not X (but not necessarily Y)", but a litotes is an understatement, actually meaning "very much Y". Like many figures of speech, litotes is better understood in some cultural and linguistic contexts than in others.

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Examples

  • "... no ordinary city." Acts 21:39 (NIV)
  • "That [sword] was not useless / to the warrior now." (Beowulf)
  • "He was not unfamiliar with the works of Dickens," provided the implication is that he was very familiar with them.
  • "The food wasn't bad," provided the implication is that it was quite good.
  • "That was no big deal."
  • "Reaching the moon was no ordinary task."
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Related phenomena

In English, such expressions as "not not good" are commonly used colloquially to express ambivalence. (This is the opposite of litotes, where the intent would be to emphasize the magnitude of the goodness.) For example, in colloquial speech, "It's not good, but it's not not good" likely means something like, "It's not particularly good, but it's not particularly bad, either."

In many languages, including some non-standard dialects of English, double negatives can be used to express a simple negation; for example, in Spanish, "No quiero nada" (literally "Not I want nothing") means "I don't want anything."

In some languages, some litotes are so idiomatic that they are not true figures of speech, but rather fixed expressions. For instance, in French, the sentence "Il faut qu'il aille" means "It's necessary that he go", while its opposite, "Il ne faut pas qu'il aille" means "it is necessary that he not go", which is much stronger than its seeming English counterpart "It's not necessary that he go."

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