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Hyperbole vs Metaphor - What's the difference?

hyperbole | metaphor |

As nouns the difference between hyperbole and metaphor

is that hyperbole is extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device 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.

hyperbole

Noun

(en noun)
  • (uncountable) Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device.
  • (uncountable) Deliberate exaggeration.
  • (countable) An instance or example of this technique.
  • (countable, obsolete) A hyperbola.
  • Quotations

    {{timeline, 1600s=1602, 1800s=1837 1841 1843, 1900s=1910, 2000s=2001}} * 1602 — i 3 *: ...and when he speaks
    'Tis like a chime a-mending; with terms unsquar'd,
    Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp'd,
    Would seem hyperboles . * 1837 — *: The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole , a feature of grandeur and magnificence. * 1841 — , ch. 28 *: "Nay - nay - good Sumach," interrupted Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole with patience. * 1843 — *: 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? * c.1910 — *: 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. * 2001 - Tom Bentley, Daniel Stedman Jones, The Moral Universe *: 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.

    Synonyms

    * overstatement * exaggeration

    Antonyms

    * meiosis * understatement

    Derived terms

    * hyperbolic

    See also

    * adynaton ----

    metaphor

    Noun

  • (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.
  • Hypernyms

    * figure of speech

    Derived terms

    * dead metaphor * extended metaphor * malaphor * metaphorical * metaphorical extension * metaphoricity * metaphorism * stale metaphor

    See also

    * analogy * idiom * metonymy * simile