Hypallage is often used strikingly in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry.

Literary critic Gérard Genette argued that the frequent use of hypallage is characteristic of Marcel Proust's style.

One kind of hypallage, also known as a transferred epithet, is the trope or rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence.

"On the idle hill of summer/Sleepy with the flow of streams/Far I hear..." (A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad) - idle hill... sleepy is a hypallage: it is the narrator, not the hill, who exhibits these features.