Figurative vs Metaphor - What's the difference?
figurative | metaphor |
Metaphorical or tropical, as opposed to literal; using figures; as of the use of "cats and dogs" in the phrase "It's raining cats and dogs".
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Metaphorically so called
With many figures of speech
Emblematic; representative
* Hooker
* J. A. Symonds
(uncountable, figure of speech) The use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like'' or ''as , which would imply a simile.
* 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, seem 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.'' — Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , 1870, translated by Daniel Beazeale, 1979.
(countable, rhetoric) The word or phrase used in this way. An implied comparison.
As an adjective figurative
is metaphorical or tropical, as opposed to literal; using figures; as of the use of "cats and dogs" in the phrase "It's raining cats and dogs".As a noun metaphor is
the use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like or as, which would imply a simile.figurative
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- This, they will say, was figurative , and served, by God's appointment, but for a time, to shadow out the true glory of a more divine sanctity.
- They belonged to a nation dedicated to the figurative arts, and they wrote for a public familiar with painted form.