Metaphor vs Comparison - What's the difference?
metaphor | comparison |
(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.
The act of comparing or the state or process of being compared.
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*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-20, volume=408, issue=8845, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= An evaluation of the similarities and differences of one or more things relative to some other or each-other.
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* (1800-1859)
*:As sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear comparison with them.
*(Richard Chenevix Trench) (1807-1886)
*:The miracles of our Lord and those of the Old Testament afford many interesting points of comparison .
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*:"I don't want to spoil any comparison you are going to make," said Jim, "but I was at Winchester and New College." ¶ "That will do," said Mackenzie. "I was dragged up at the workhouse school till I was twelve."
With a negation, the state of being similar or alike.
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(label) The ability of adjectives and adverbs to form three degrees, as in hot, hotter, hottest .
That to which, or with which, a thing is compared, as being equal or like; illustration; similitude.
*(Bible), (w) iv. 30
*:Whereto shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what comparison shall we compare it?
(label) A simile.
(label) The faculty of the reflective group which is supposed to perceive resemblances and contrasts.
As nouns the difference between metaphor and comparison
is that metaphor is (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 while comparison is the act of comparing or the state or process of being compared.metaphor
English
(wikipedia metaphor)Noun
Hypernyms
* figure of speechDerived terms
* dead metaphor * extended metaphor * malaphor * metaphorical * metaphorical extension * metaphoricity * metaphorism * stale metaphorSee also
* analogy * idiom * metonymy * similecomparison
English
Noun
(en noun)Old soldiers?, passage=Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine. The machine gun is so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparisons are meaningless.}}
