What are examples of traductio?

"A person who has nothing more in life to be desired than life itself is incapable of cultivating a virtuous life" (Rhetorica ad Herennium, c. 80 BCE): one word, said three times, threading the whole thought. That is traductio (the repetition of a word, or a changed form or sense of it, across a sentence or passage to bind and emphasize). The complication is that most "traductio examples" you will run into are really narrower figures wearing the name: polyptoton when the word's form changes, antanaclasis when its sense does. Roman handbooks used traductio as the catch-all those later figures were carved out of, so the examples below are sorted by which kind of repetition they actually are, letting you see both the figure and where it stops.

What Do Clear Examples of Traductio Look Like?

The cleanest cases repeat one word, unchanged, at intervals, so the word becomes the spine of the sentence.

• "A person who has nothing more in life to be desired than life itself is incapable of cultivating a virtuous life." (Rhetorica ad Herennium, c. 80 BCE) The figure's classical attestation. "Life" returns three times, the same word each time, and each return tightens the loop the sentence is drawing around the idea.
• "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." (Lincoln, "Gettysburg Address," 1863) "People" repeats across three prepositional phrases. The word holds steady while the relation to it shifts, which is what gives the line its sense of turning the same thing over and over.
• "When they go low, we go high." (Michelle Obama, Democratic National Convention, 2016) Here the repeated word is "go," carried from the opposing clause into your own. The repetition is what makes the line a rebuttal rather than two separate statements.

Roman writers filed looser repetitions under traductio too, where the word comes back in a new form or a new sense. Modern handbooks have names for those, so here each case is flagged with the narrower figure it would be filed under today.

• "The Greeks are strong, and skillful to their strength." (Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, c. 1602) "Strong" returns as "strength." Same root, different grammatical form. Under the modern split this is polyptoton, but it sits squarely inside the Roman sense of traductio.
• "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." (Ecclesiastes 1:2, KJV) "Vanity" repeats, then bends into the plural "vanities," then returns. The shift between singular and plural is the changed-form repetition the Roman term covered.
• "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." (attributed to Benjamin Franklin, 1776) "Hang" comes back in a different sense: stay united, then be executed. That sense-shift is antanaclasis today, but it is the same broad word-repetition traductio originally named.

Did you know? The name comes from Latin traductio, "a leading across" or "transference." The figure does literally that: it leads one word across the sentence, carrying it from clause to clause instead of letting it drop after a single use.

How Can You Tell Traductio From Polyptoton, Antanaclasis, Ploce, and Diaphora?

Nearly every loose "traductio example" is really one of four narrower figures. The reason is historical: traductio was the Roman catch-all for repeating a word, and later writers carved out separate names for the specific kinds of repetition inside it. So a single example can be correctly labeled more than one way, and scholars and handbooks do not all draw these lines in the same place. The test for each is what happens to the word when it comes back.

Polyptoton (the same word repeated in a different grammatical form) keeps the root and changes the inflection: "strong" to "strength," "love" to "loved" to "loving." The word is recognizably the same; only its part of speech or ending moves.

Antanaclasis (the same word repeated in a different sense) keeps the word's form exactly but swaps its meaning. Franklin's two senses of "hang" are the standard case. The pleasure of it is the small jolt when the second use refuses to mean what the first one did.

Diaphora (repeating a word so a general sense and a specific sense both register) is the subtler cousin of antanaclasis: the word repeats so that it points first at the category and then at a particular member of it, as in "boys will be boys," where the second "boys" means the type rather than the children.

Ploce (repeating a word for emphasis with other words in between) is itself a broad term, close to traductio, and the two are often used interchangeably. Where a distinction is drawn, ploce tends to name the plain emphatic recurrence of a word across a passage, without requiring the form or sense to change.

Traductio is the umbrella over all of these. If a word comes back at intervals to bind and stress a passage, whether unchanged, re-formed, or re-meant, it falls under traductio. The narrower name applies when you can say precisely how the word changed.

Figure	What it repeats (the distinguishing test)	One-line example
Traductio	A word at intervals, in any guise: same, re-formed, or re-meant	"...a virtuous life" after two prior uses of "life"
Polyptoton	The same word in a different grammatical form	"strong" returning as "strength"
Antanaclasis	The same word in a different sense	"hang together" / "hang separately"
Diaphora	A word so a general and a specific sense both register	"boys will be boys"
Ploce	A word for plain emphasis, with words in between	"people... people... people"

The traductio-versus-polyptoton line is the one writers hit most, since changed-form repetition is so common; the difference between traductio and polyptoton comes down to whether you are naming the broad act of repeating or the specific change in form.

When Is It Worth Reaching for Traductio in Your Own Writing?

Repeating one word across a passage buys you cohesion and emphasis: the sentence feels like it is turning the same thought over rather than moving on to a new one. Lincoln's "people" works because the word is load-bearing. The whole argument of the line is about whose government it is, so the word can stand being said three times.

It fails when the repeated word is forgettable. "The thing about this is the thing nobody mentions" repeats a word with no weight, so the recurrence reads as an accidental echo or a writer who lost the thread, not a deliberate figure. The test for your own draft is simple: would the repeated word carry being underlined? If underlining it would look right, the repetition is probably earning its place. If underlining it would look like a typo, cut back to a single use and find a different word for the others.

It also tips into monotony fast. One word driven back through a sentence is a figure; the same word driven through five sentences is a verbal tic. Use it where the thought genuinely circles back on one idea, and let it go where the passage is moving forward.

The most useful thing to carry away is that traductio is less a single figure than the Roman umbrella the modern names were carved out of. When you have a repetition in front of you, the skill worth having is not labeling it "traductio" but seeing which narrower figure it actually is: whether the form changed, whether the sense changed, or whether the word simply came back unaltered to hold the passage together.