BSEH SS Urdu key terms

Urdu prose, especially the prescribed textbook lessons in the syllabus; covers narrative, descriptive and expository passages together with their comprehension questions and textual exercises.

A prescribed lesson in the prose textbook; students must know its theme, characters, central idea, difficult words and the answers to its end-of-lesson questions.

Explanation of a passage or couplet: restating its plain sense, then unfolding its meaning, imagery and underlying idea in the candidate's own words.

The subject or theme of a lesson or essay; also the name of the essay-writing task in the composition paper, where a topic must be developed in ordered paragraphs.

Urdu poetry written in regular rhyming couplets on a single theme, as distinct from the ghazal; prescribed poems are studied for theme, message and poetic devices.

A poem of five to fifteen independent couplets sharing one metre, rhyme and refrain, each couplet usually standing as a complete thought of its own.

A couplet, the basic unit of Urdu poetry; its two lines are called misra-e-oola and misra-e-sani, and together they carry one complete idea.

The opening couplet of a ghazal, in which both lines end with the same rhyme and refrain; it sets the pattern that later couplets follow.

The closing couplet of a ghazal, often containing the poet's pen name (takhallus) and frequently turning the poem's thought toward the poet himself.

The word or short phrase repeated unchanged at the end of both lines of the matla and of the second line of every following couplet in a ghazal.

The rhyming word that comes immediately before the radeef in a ghazal; successive couplets vary the qafia while keeping the radeef fixed.

The pen name a poet inserts into the maqta of a ghazal, so that the closing couplet names its author; for example Ghalib or Iqbal.

The metre of an Urdu poem, built from recurring patterns of short and long syllables; all couplets of a ghazal must share the same bahr.

Simile: the explicit likening of one thing to another through a word such as 'like' or 'as', as when a beloved's face is compared to the moon.

Metaphor: using a word for something other than its literal referent because of a shared quality, without an explicit word of comparison; a borrowed image.

Figurative or transferred usage, where a word is applied beyond its literal sense; covers metaphor, metonymy and related tropes studied under poetic devices.

Hyperbole: deliberate exaggeration for emphasis or effect, common in Urdu poetry where a lover's suffering or a beloved's beauty is magnified beyond ordinary measure.

The paired themes of beauty and love that run through classical Urdu poetry, with the lover (ashiq) enduring pain while the beloved (maashooq) remains indifferent.

Islamic mysticism, whose vocabulary of the heart, the beloved, the tavern and self-annihilation supplies much of the imagery of classical Urdu ghazal and nazm.

Urdu grammar: the rules of syntax and morphology examined in the paper, including parts of speech, gender, number, case and sentence construction.

Noun: a word naming a person, place, thing or abstract idea; in Urdu grammar it is classified by gender, number and by whether it is proper, common or collective.

Verb: a word expressing an action or state, carrying tense, person, gender and number; Urdu verbs take auxiliaries in compound forms such as raha, chuka and gaya.

Particle: an indeclinable word that gains meaning only in relation to other words, such as postpositions (ko, se, mein) and conjunctions (aur, lekin).

Masculine and feminine grammatical gender; every Urdu noun is assigned one, and the gender governs the agreement of verbs, adjectives and pronouns.

Singular and plural number; the paper tests how Urdu nouns and verbs form and agree in number, including irregular plurals and respectful plural usage.

Grammatical tense; Urdu distinguishes past, present and future, with habitual, continuous and perfective aspects expressed through auxiliary verbs.

An idiom: a fixed phrase whose meaning cannot be worked out from its individual words; the paper asks for correct use in sentences and for matching meanings.

A proverb: a short, widely known saying that expresses a general truth or piece of folk wisdom, tested for meaning and appropriate contextual use.

A character sketch: a short prose portrait that captures a real person's appearance, habits and manner through selected telling details rather than full biography.

A preface or short introductory note; also used for the opening paragraph of a composition, which must state the topic and catch the reader's attention.

A quotation or borrowed passage; in composition papers it may also mean the précis task, where a passage is condensed faithfully into its essential points.

A summary or précis: a shortened restatement of a passage that keeps its main ideas and proportion, drops examples and repetition, and adds no new material.

A letter; the composition paper tests formal and informal letters, requiring correct salutation, body paragraphs, closing formula and the writer's address and date.

Translation; candidates render a passage from Urdu into English or from English into Urdu, keeping the sense, register and idiom of the original rather than translating word for word.

A literary school or movement, such as the Delhi and Lucknow schools of Urdu poetry; each has recognisable conventions of diction, theme and tone.

A literary period or age, for example the Mughal twilight, the nineteenth-century reform era, or the progressive writers' movement, each shaping the literature produced in it.

Progressive; describes the twentieth-century literary movement that urged writers to address social injustice, poverty and colonial rule in plain, purposeful language.

Biography: an account of a person's life written by someone else, as distinct from an autobiography; the syllabus expects knowledge of major authors' lives and works.