Oulipo is an acronym for Ouvoir de Litterature Potentielle. The texts, edited and translated by Motte, "have been chosen to provide a sampler of Oulipian poetic theory, from the polemical language of the early manifestos to the more elaborate formulations of a startling literary aesthetic." Raymond Queneau nourished and directed the evolution of the group. His definition of the work is "potential literature that is the search for new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit." Queneau's work, "Cent Mille Millards de poems - One hundred thousand billion poems" is regarded as the seminal Oulipian text and "echoes throughout the essays in this collection and permeates the Oulipian enterprise as a whole."The history of Oulipo, that formed in 1960, is provided in an introductory essay. The end of the book provides a Glossary of linguistic terms. The Glossary includes names of Oulipian and pre-Oulipian poetic structures, as well as figures of classical rhetoric (many of the latter occur in Marcel Benabou's "Table of Elementary Linguistic and Literary Operations"). In the few cases in which Oulipian use of a term differs from general usage, this has been noted. The reader may find examples of many of the structures in La Littrature poten-tielle and Atlas de litterature potentielle, referred to below as I and 11, respec-tively.ALPHABETICAL DRAMA: A short theatrical form in which the lines spoken by the actors homophonically mimic the sound of a person reciting the alphabet, See 1, 111-14.ANAGLYPHIC TEXT: A three-dimensional verbal text. See 1, 289.ANAPHORA: Repetition of a word at the beginning of successive utterances: e.g., "I came, I saw, I conquered."ANASTROPHE: Unusual inversion of words or syntagms within an utterance: e.g., "Came the dawn."ANTIRHYME: If one accepts the supposition that one may, for any given phoneme, postulate an "antiphoneme"-that is, a phoneme having opposite, complementary, or sym-metrical characteristics-it would be possible to create antirhymes, or couplets ending in phonemes and their antiphonemes. Antirhyme is a special case of an-tonymic translation. See 1, 291.ANTONYMIC TRANSLATION: A process of textual production that involves the transformation of an utterance into its contrary, along a given axis of symmetry. The latter may be situated at any level: that of the individual word, of grammatical characteristics, or of the general signification of an utterance. See 1, 204-05; 11, 165.APHAERESIS: The omitting of a syllable or a letter at the beginning of a word: e.g., "bo" for "hobo."BEAU PRESENT: A form of acrostic encoding in which the letters of a given name appear, in or-der, in the text. According to the most doctrinaire, the letters of that name, once used, may not be used again in the text. Georges Perec practiced a special form of the beau present, using only the letters of a given name to construct the text. See 11, 264, 291-92.BELLE ABSENTE: A form of acrostic encoding in which the letters of a given name are the only letters not used in the text. In verse forms, one letter may be excluded in each verse: the name is thus progressively spelled out in absentia. See 11, 213, 290-91, and Georges Perec, La C1oture et autres poemes, 73-76.BOOLIAN POEMS: A process of textual production devised by Francois Le Lionnais, a literary ap-plication of the Work of the British mathematician George Boole (1815-64). See 1, 262-68.BRACHYLOGIA: An abridged expression: e.g., "And he to England shall along with you" (Ham-let, 111, iii).CENTO: A text composed of passages from other texts. See 1, 172-75, 209-14.CHRONOGRAM: A text in which certain letters, when placed together, form a date in Roman numerals. See 11, 268-70.COMBINATORICS (in book but not in glossary): Consists of poetry created from factorials, Fibanocci sequences and exponents. An example of the latter is Quenau's A Hundred Thousand Thousand Poems. This book consists of ten sonnets, of 14 verses each, arranged in such a way that the reader may replace as he/she wishes each verse by one of the nine others that correspond to it. Thus, the reader may compose 100,000,000,000,000 different poems, allof which respect the immutable rules of the sonnet. COUPEUR A LA LIGNE: [Cutter on the line]. A variation of the TIREUR A LA LIGNE consisting of the progressive suppression of alternate sentences in a text. See 11, 285.CRASIS: Contraction of two letters or syllables into one.DEPORTMANTEAU WORD: The division of a portmanteau word into its original constitutive elements.DIAERESIS: In the Oulipian lexicon, the division of one syllable into two.EDGES OF POEM: A process of textual production that uses the first and last verses, plus the first and last words of the intervening verses of a given poem. See 1, 292-93.EPANALEPSIS: Repetition at the end of an utterance of the word with which it began: e.g., "I would like that, would I"EPENTHESIS: Insertion of a letter, phoneme, or syllable into the middle of a word: e.g., "visitating" for "visiting."EURYPHALLIC VERSE: See SNOWBALL.GEMINATION: In the Oulipian lexicon, the doubling of the initial syllable of an utterance.HAIKUIZATION: A process that retains the rhyming parts of a poem to form a new poem. See Queneau's "Potential Literature," and 1, 185-203.HAPLOGRAPHY: An error through which a copyist deletes a segment of a text, due to the identity of the initial and final elements of the segment.HENDIADYS: A figure of speech using two nouns and the conjunction "and," rather than a noun and an adjective, to express a given idea.HETEROGRAM: A text in which no letter is repeated. A "perfect" heterogram is also a "perfect" pangram: a text of 26 letters using all the letters of the alphabet. Georges Perecpracticed a form called "heterogrammatic poetry" in which each verse of a given text is an anagram of every other verse within that text. See 11, 23 1-36, 337, and Perec, Alphabets, Ulcerations, and La C1oture et autres poemes.HOLOPOEMS: Following the principles of holography, holopoems are represented as images in space. As the reader moves under (or over, or around) them, new words or verses become apparent. See 1. 290.HOLORHYME: A form of homophonic verse. See 1, 237-38. See also HOMOMORPHISM.HOMOEUTELEUTON: The repetition of a phoneme at the end of successive utterances: e.g., rhymed verses.HOMOMORPHISM: A process by which new texts are generated, which imitate the structure of a master text. The different types of homomorphisms are defined by the structure imitated: homosyntaxism, homovocalism, homophony, etc. See 1, 115, 176-80; 11, 159-164.JAVANESE STUTTERING: A form of stuttering wherein syllables, rather than phonemes, are repeated. See Jean Lescure's "Poeme pour begue," 1, 116.LARDING: A form of TIREUR A LA LIGNE elaborated by Paul Fournel. In his example, a Queneau text is successively "larded" with 3, 1, 4, and 1 new sentences (this series, of course, corresponds to the first four figures of the number pie). See 11, 283. LA RIEN QUE LA TOUTE LA: [The nothing but everything the.] A text without nouns, verbs, or adjectives, a structure proposed by Frangois Le Lionnais. See 1, 228-29.LIPOGRAM: A text in which a given letter (or letters) of the alphabet does not appear. See Georges Perec. "History of the Lipogram," La Disparition, and Les Revenentes.See also 1, 77-1W 11, 211-17. Liponyms, lipophonemes, and liposyllables aretexts in which (respectively) a given word, phoneme, or syllable does not appear.L. S. D.: "Litterature Semo-Definitionnelle": Semo-Definitional Literature, a procedure elaborated by Marcel Benabou and Georges Perec. Various effects are obtained through the substitution of the definitions of given words within a text for the words themselves. See 1, 123-40.METATHESIS: The transposition of letters or phonemes in a word: e.g."modren" for "modern."PALINDROME: A written locution that reads the same backward or forward. Palindromes may be "positive" or -negative": that is, composed, respectively, of an even or odd number of integers. See 1, 101-W 11, 218-26. Phonetic palindromes, syllabic palindromes. and word palindromes are texts in which the reflected integers are, respectively, phonemes, syllables, and words, rather than letters. See 11, 220-21.PANGRAM: A text containing all the letters of the alphabet. Obviously, the "value" of a pangram increases in inverse proportion to its length. A "perfect" pangram is a text of 26 letters including all the letters of the alphabet. See 11, 23 1-32.PARAGOGE: The addition of a letter or a syllable to the end of a word. This addition may be either functional (e.g., "drowned") or unnecessary (e.g., "drownded").PARAGRAM: A printer's error consisting of the substitution of one letter for another. As Marcel Benabou uses the word in his "Table of Elementary Linguistic and Literary Operations," it bears only a very distant relation to the Saussurian notion of "paragram"PERVERB: A perverb juxtaposes the first part of one proverb to the second part of another. See 11, 293-94, 344-45.POEMS FOR MOEBIUS STRIP: A process elaborated by Luc Etienne, involving the disposition of a text on a Moebius strip. See 1, 269-75. PORTMANTEAU WORD: A word that formally and semantically conflates two other words: e.g., "smog,"from "smoke" and "fog."PROSTHESIS: The addition of a letter or a syllable to the beginning of a word: e.g., "irregardless" for "regardless."RHOPALIC VERSE See SNOWBALL.S + 7: A method of textual transformation elaborated by Jean Lescure in which each substantive in a given text is replaced by the seventh substantive following it in the dictionary. See 1, 143-54; 11, 166-70.SNOWBALL: A form in which each segment of a text is one letter longer than the segment preceding it. Also called euryphallic verse and rhopalic verse. A number of vari-ations are conceivable. such as the "melting snowball" (see Harrv Mathews's "Liminal Poem"), in which. after its expansion, the poem contracts. See 1. 107-M 11, 194-210.SPOONERISM: A generally unintentional transposition of sounds in two or more words: e.g., "tee many martoonis.- Named after the Reverend W. A. Spooner (1844-1930) of New College, Oxford, renowned for this sort of verbal lapsus. In French literature, the conscious use of spoonerisms, or contrepeterie, is thought to have originated with Rabelais. Luc Etienne's L'Art du contrepet serves as a spoonerism primer.SQUARE POEM: A form proposed by Jean Lescure that exploits all possible permutations of a given set of four words. See his Drailles, 277-84, and 1, 155-65.SYNCOPE: The dropping of letters or syllables in the middle of a word or expression: e.g., "Halloween" for "all hallow even."TAUTOGRAM: A text whose words all begin with the same letter. See 1, 117.TIREUR A LA LIGNE: [Puller on the line.] A form elaborated by Jacques Duchateau. Consists of taking two sentences in a given text and interpolating a new sentence, then two new sentences in the interstices thus created, and so forth. See Duchateau. Les Sept Coups du tireur du la ligne en apocalypse lent, occupe a lire "Monnaie de singe" de William Faulkner, and 11, 271-85. See also COUPEUR A LA LIGNE and LARD-ING.TMESIS: Insertion of one or more words between the parts of a compound word: e.g., "what person soever" for "whatsoever person."UNTRACEABLE LOCUTIONS: A form elaborated by Marcel Benabou. See his Locutions introuvables. See alsoPERVERB.ZEUGMA: A figure in which a single modifier applies in different ways to two or more words: e.g., "The room was not light, but his fingers were." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.