Conceit vs Metaphor - What's the difference?
conceit | metaphor |
(obsolete) Something conceived in the mind; an idea, a thought.
* Francis Bacon
* Bible, Proverbs xxvi. 12
The faculty of conceiving ideas; mental faculty; apprehension.
* Sir Philip Sidney
Quickness of apprehension; active imagination; lively fancy.
* Shakespeare
(obsolete) Opinion, (neutral) judgment.
* 1499 , (John Skelton), The Bowge of Courte :
(countable) A novel or fanciful idea; a whim.
* L'Estrange
* Alexander Pope
* Dryden
(countable, rhetoric, literature) An ingenious expression or metaphorical idea, especially in extended form or used as a literary or rhetorical device.
(uncountable) Overly high self-esteem; vain pride; hubris.
* Cotton
Design; pattern.
(obsolete) To form an idea; to think.
* 1643 : ,
(obsolete) To conceive.
* South
* Shakespeare
(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 nouns the difference between conceit and metaphor
is that conceit is something conceived in the mind; an idea, a thought while 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.As a verb conceit
is to form an idea; to think.conceit
English
Alternative forms
* (obsolete)Noun
- In laughing, there ever procedeth a conceit of somewhat ridiculous.
- a man wise in his own conceit
- a man of quick conceit
- How often, alas! did her eyes say unto me that they loved! and yet I, not looking for such a matter, had not my conceit open to understand them.
- His wit's as thick as Tewksbury mustard; there is no more conceit in him than is in a mallet.
- By him that me boughte, than quod Dysdayne, / I wonder sore he is in suche cenceyte .
- On his way to the gibbet, a freak took him in the head to go off with a conceit .
- Some to conceit alone their works confine, / And glittering thoughts struck out at every line.
- Tasso is full of conceits which are not only below the dignity of heroic verse but contrary to its nature.
- Plumed with conceit he calls aloud.
- (Shakespeare)
Derived terms
* conceited * conceitedly * conceitedness * self-conceitVerb
(en verb)The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
- Those whose vulgar apprehensions conceit but low of matrimonial purposes.
- The strong, by conceiting themselves weak, are therebly rendered as inactive as if they really were so.
- One of two bad ways you must conceit me, / Either a coward or a flatterer.