What is synecdoche?

Synecdoche is a form of metaphor. It is when you take a part of a thing to stand for the whole thing.
Examples:
1) People say ‘wheels’ to mean a whole car – ‘check out my new wheels’ means come and look at my new car
2) You can say ‘head’ when you mean people – teachers will often say they have to ‘count heads’ or do a ‘head check’ but they mean they need to count how many students they have
3)The phrase ‘need a hand’ is extremely common, but what you mean is you need a whole person to help you rather than just a hand!
It can also be reversed, and you can use a whole thing to refer to a smaller subsection of it.
Example: This is often used in sport, for example ‘England lost by six wickets’ – what this means is the English cricket team rather than the whole country
Synecdoche is most often found in poetry, but also in plays and novels. Make sure you watch out for it in any texts you have already studied or unseen poems you might get in the exam. It is often used by modern poets as it can reflect everyday speech really well - you’d be surprised how much we all use synecdoche.
Therefore its effect can be to show how different groups of people really speak. We can trace this through time, as poets for hundreds of years have been using synecdoche to show figures of speech - even Shakespeare used it!
Example: In Act 4, Scene 3 of Macbeth, Macbeth tells a servant to leave with the line “take thy face hence”
What Macbeth is doing is telling the servant (the ‘face’) to leave the room because he is angry. It seems even more insulting because he refuses to use the servant’s name, and reduces him to just a ‘face’. It really highlights Macbeth’s violent nature at this point in the play.
Synecdoche can also be used to make a sentence more elevated and poetic. It is far more interesting to read ‘take thy face hence’ than if Macbeth told the servant to ‘go away’!
Synecdoche is very similar to another technique called metonymy, but is important to know the difference. Instead of taking a part of a thing to refer to a whole, metonymy is where you use an attribute of something, or something it is closely related to, to stand for the thing itself.
Examples:
1) Using the word ‘suit’ to mean a businessman
Suit is associated with businesses, and it is therefore often used to stand for them‘
2) ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’
What this common phrase means is the written word (the ‘pen) is more powerful than fighting (the ‘sword’) - it uses two associated symbols to stand for the real meaning
As you can see, synecdoche is very common in everyday language, so it’s definitely something to look out for in English language papers or in the texts you study for English literature.