What's the difference between
and
Enter two words to compare and contrast their definitions, origins, and synonyms to better understand how those words are related.

Similitude vs Metaphor - What's the difference?

similitude | metaphor | Related terms |

As nouns the difference between similitude and metaphor

is that similitude is similarity or resemblance to something else 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.

similitude

Noun

  • (uncountable) Similarity or resemblance to something else.
  • * 1997 : Chris Horrocks, Introducing Foucault'', page 67, ''The Renaissance Episteme (Totem Books, Icon Books; ISBN 1840460865)
  • Renaissance man thought in terms of similitudes': the theatre ''of'' life, the mirror ''of'' nature. […]
    '''Aemulation''' was '
    similitude
    within distance: the sky resembled a face because it had “eyes” — the sun and moon.
  • (countable) A way in which two people or things share similitude.
  • * 1997 : Chris Horrocks, Introducing Foucault'', page 67, ''The Renaissance Episteme (Totem Books, Icon Books; ISBN 1840460865)
  • Renaissance man thought in terms of 'similitudes'''''': the theatre ''of'' life, the mirror ''of'' nature. […]
    '
    Aemulation
    was similitude within distance: the sky resembled a face because it had “eyes” — the sun and moon.
  • (countable) Someone or something that closely resembles another; a duplicate or twin.
  • * Wilkie Collins, Nine O'Clock!
  • If I was certain of anything in the world, I was certain that I had seen my brother in the study — nay, more, had touched him, — and equally certain that I had seen his double — his exact similitude , in the garden.
  • A parable or allegory.
  • * 1526 , William Tyndale, trans. Bible , Matthew XIII:
  • And he spake many thynges to them in similitudes , sayinge: Beholde, the sower wentt forth to sowe, And as he sowed, some fell by the wayes side [...].

    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