metaphor
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈmɛ.tə.fə/
ipa: /ˈmɛt.ə.fɔː/
ipa: /ˈmɛt.ə.foɹ/
ipa: /ˈmɛ.tə.fɚ/
rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)
Forms: form: metaphors
Etymology: From Middle French métaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Ancient Greek μεταφορά (metaphorá), from μεταφέρω (metaphérō, “I transfer, apply”), from μετά (metá, “with, across, after”) + φέρω (phérō, “I bear, carry”).
Senses: examples: text: The next group of computational approaches to metaphor assume that metaphor is basically a hidden analogy.
ref: 2013, Eileen Cornell Way, Knowledge Representation and Metaphor, page 157:
coordinate_terms: simile
glosses: The use of a word, phrase, concept, or set of concepts to refer to something other than its literal meaning, invoking an implicit similarity between the thing described and what is denoted by the word, etc., that is used.
examples: text: A Metaphor, in place of proper words,
Resemblance puts; and dress to speech affords.
ref: 1835, L[arret] Langley, “[The Seven Tropes.] Metaphor.”, in A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster, South Yorkshire: […] C. White, […], →OCLC, page 3:
text: A Metaphor may be changed into a Simile, and also into plain language, containing neither metaphor nor simile. Thus:
Metaphor. — Idleness is the rust of the soul.
Simile. — As rust is to iron, so is idleness to the soul, taking away its strength and power of resistance.
Plain. — Idleness takes away from the soul its strength and power of resistance.
ref: 1874, John Seely Hart, First Lessons in Composition, page 92:
text: 1979, Daniel Breazeale (translator), Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense [1873, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn], in Philosophy and Truth, page 84, quoted in 1998, Ian Markham, Truth and the Reality of God: An Essay in Natural Theology, page 103,
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seems to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
text: To torture the metaphor, though, they’re sitting at a table outside the Nazi bar; their friends are there, they’re having a good time, maybe they hear a slur emanate from the window from time to time.
ref: 2025 May 23, Charlie Warzel, “What Are People Still Doing on X?”, in The Atlantic:
glosses: A word or phrase used in such implied comparison.
examples: desktop metaphor; wastebasket metaphor
topics: computing
engineering
graphical-user-interface
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: The use of an everyday object or concept to represent an underlying facet of the computer and thus aid users in performing tasks.
Hypernyms: word: figure of speech
word: trope
Derived terms: conceptual metaphor
dead metaphor
extended metaphor
malaphor
metaphoreme
metaphoric
metaphorical
metaphorical extension
metaphorically
metaphorician
metaphoricity
metaphorics
metaphorism
metaphorist
metaphorization
metaphorize
metaphorology
mixed metaphor
stale metaphor
supermetaphor
Related terms: analogy
idiom
metonymy
metonym
simile
allegory