Recent Examples on the Web But everyone knows that’s just a welcome bit of hyperbole. It refers to understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negation of the contrary, as in "not a bad idea" or "not unpleasant." And speaking of litotes (pronounced \LYE-tuh-teez\ ), that term is an approximate antonym of hyperbole. It's from the field of rhetoric, which makes it at home with terms like metaphor, trope, and litotes. Although these days you might encounter hyperbole in a magazine at the doctor's office, the word's first use was technical. The fact that hyperbole is pronounced in a way counter to the usual workings of English pronunciation gives a hint as to the word's history in the language. The macron tells us that the vowel is pronounced like \ee\. It has a line, called a macron, over the final e: hyperbolē. The word comes to English directly from Latin, but the Latin word is from a Greek word that has one crucial visual difference. It should sound just like the word bowl, right? Nope. It begins with the prefix hyper-, which we know in words like hyperlink (and in the adjective hyper itself), but instead of having the accent, or emphasis, on the first syllable-HYE-per-link-it has the accent on the second syllable: hye-PER-buh-lee. This word doesn't behave the way we expect a word that's spelled this way to behave.