What is the difference between metonymy and metaphor?
metonymy | metaphor |
The use of a single characteristic or name of an object to identify an entire object or related object.
(countable) A metonym.
{{examples-right, caption=metonymy , examples=*The White House released its official report today. — "The White House" for "The presidential administration"
* The Crown has enacted a new social security policy. — "The Crown" for "The government of the United Kingdom".
* A crowd of fifty heads — where "head" stands for person.
* Put it on the plastic — material (plastic) for object (credit card), width=60%}} (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.
Metaphor is a coordinate term of metonymy.
As nouns the difference between metonymy and metaphor
is that metonymy is the use of a single characteristic or name of an object to identify an entire object or related object 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.metonymy
English
(wikipedia metonymy)Noun
* The Crown has enacted a new social security policy. — "The Crown" for "The government of the United Kingdom".
* A crowd of fifty heads — where "head" stands for person.
* Put it on the plastic — material (plastic) for object (credit card), width=60%}}
