Hyperbaton /haɪˈpɜːrbətɒn/ is a figure of speech that alters the syntactic order of the words in a sentence or separates normally-associated words. The term may also be used more generally for all different figures of speech that transpose the natural word order in sentences.
"Hyperbaton" is a word borrowed from the Greek hyperbaton (ὑπέρβατον), meaning "transposition," which is derived from hyper ("over") and bainein ("to step"), with the -tos verbal adjective suffix.
The separation of connected words for emphasis or effect is possible to a much greater degree in highly inflected languages, where sentence meaning does not depend closely on word order. In Latin and Ancient Greek, the effect of hyperbaton is usually to emphasize the first word. It has been called "perhaps the most distinctively alien feature of Latin word order."Donatus, in his work On tropes, includes under hyperbaton five varieties: hysterologia, anastrophe (for which the term hyperbaton is sometimes used loosely as a synonym), parenthesis, tmesis, and synchysis.