hyperbole
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /haɪˈpɜːbəli/
ipa: /haɪˈpɝbəli/
homophone: hyperbolae
Forms: form: hyperboles
Etymology: From Middle English iperbole, yperbole, from Latin hyperbolē, from Ancient Greek ὑπερβολή (huperbolḗ, “excess, exaggeration”), from ὑπέρ (hupér, “above”) + βάλλω (bállō, “I throw”, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *gʷelH-). Doublet of hyperbola.
Senses: examples: text: Hyperbole soars too high, or creeps too low,
Exceeds the truth, things wonderful to shew.
ref: 1835, L[arret] Langley, “[The Seven Tropes.] Hyperbole.”, in A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster, South Yorkshire: […] C. White, […], →OCLC, page 12:
text: The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.
ref: 1837 March 6, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Legends of the Province House”, in Twice-Told Tales, Boston, Mass.: American Stationers Co.; John B. Russell, →OCLC:
text: "Nay, nay, good Sumach," interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole, with patience[…]
ref: 1841, J[ames] Fenimore Cooper, chapter VIII, in The Deerslayer: A Tale. […], 1st British edition, volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 248:
text: Of course the hymn has come to us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own soil—which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
ref: 1913, Theodore Roosevelt, “Productive Scholarship”, in History as Literature, and Other Essays:
text: The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. […] That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.
ref: 1987, Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal, New York: Random House, →ISBN, page 40:
text: In these circumstances, hyperbole is called for, the rhetorical figure that raises its objects up, excessively, way above their actual merit : it is not to deceive by exaggeration that one overshoots the mark, but to allow the true value, the truth of what is insufficiently valued, to appear.
ref: 1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, in Cigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published 1993, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 17:
text: The perennial problem, especially for the BBC, has been to reconcile the hyperbole-driven agenda of newspapers with the requirement of balance, which is crucial to the public service remit.
ref: 2001, Tom Bentley, Daniel Stedman Jones, The Moral Universe:
text: Trump has always believed in “truthful hyperbole,” as he called it in “The Art of the Deal.” But now it’s untruthful hyperbole.
ref: 2025 June 28, Maureen Dowd, “Obfuscating on Obliterating”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
text: Of course, Altman has a penchant for hyperbole, and OpenAI—like the rest of the AI industry—likes to tout each new model as the best ever.
ref: 2025 August 7, Matteo Wong, “The New ChatGPT Resets the AI Race”, in The Atlantic:
topics: literature
media
publishing
synonyms: overstatement
exaggeration
auxesis
antonyms: understatement
glosses: Deliberate or unintentional overstatement, particularly extreme overstatement.
examples: text: […]and when he ſpeakes, / 'Tis like a Chime a mending. With tearmes vnſquar' / Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropt, / Would ſeemes Hyperboles
ref: c. 1602, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii], column 2:
text: The honourable gentleman forces us to hear a good deal of this detestable rhetoric; and then he asks why, if the secretaries of the Nizam and the King of Oude use all these tropes and hyperboles, Lord Ellenborough should not indulge in the same sort of eloquence?
ref: 1843, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Gates of Somnauth:
glosses: An instance or example of such overstatement.
topics: geometry
mathematics
sciences
glosses: A hyperbola.
Derived terms: cyberbole
hyperbolic
hyperbolism
hyperbolist
hyperbolize
Related terms: hyperbola
adynaton