different between hyperbole vs metaphor

English

Etymology

From Latin hyperbol?, from Ancient Greek ???????? (huperbol?, “excess, exaggeration”), from ???? (hupér, “above”) + ????? (báll?, “I throw”). Doublet of hyperbola.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ha??p??b?li/
• Homophones: hyperbolae

Noun

hyperbole (countable and uncountable, plural hyperboles)

1. (uncountable, rhetoric, literature) Deliberate or unintentional overstatement, particularly extreme overstatement.
   • 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Legends of the Province House

     The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.

   • c. 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, Productive Scholarship

     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.

   • 1987, Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal, p. 58.

     The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. ..People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

   • 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.

2. (countable) An instance or example of such overstatement.
   • 1843, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Gates of Somnauth

     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?

3. (countable, obsolete) A hyperbola.

Synonyms

• (rhetoric): overstatement, exaggeration, auxesis

Antonyms

• (rhetoric): See understatement

Derived terms

• hyperbolic

Related terms

• hyperbola

Translations

See also

• adynaton

French

Etymology

From Latin hyperbole, from Ancient Greek ???????? (huperbol?, “excess, exaggeration”), from ??? (hupé, “above”) + ????? (báll?, “I throw”).

Pronunciation

• ^{(mute h)} IPA^(key): /i.p??.b?l/
• Homophone: hyperboles
• Hyphenation: hy?per?bole

Noun

hyperbole f (plural hyperboles)

1. (rhetoric) hyperbole
2. (geometry) hyperbola

Related terms

• hyperbolique

Descendants

• ? Turkish: hiperbol

Further reading

• “hyperbole” in Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).

Latin

Etymology

From Ancient Greek ???????? (huperbol?, “excess, exaggeration”), from ??? (hupé, “above”) + ????? (báll?, “I throw”).

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /hy?per.bo.le?/, [h??p?rb???e?]
• (Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /i?per.bo.le/, [i?p?rb?l?]

Noun

hyperbol? f (genitive hyperbol?s); first declension

1. exaggeration; hyperbole
2. ablative singular of hyperbol?
3. vocative singular of hyperbol?

Declension

First-declension noun (Greek-type).

References

• hyperbole in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• hyperbole in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré Latin-Français, Hachette

English

Etymology

From Middle French métaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Ancient Greek ???????? (metaphorá), from ???????? (metaphér?, “I transfer, apply”), from ???? (metá, “with, across, after”) + ???? (phér?, “I bear, carry”)

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /?m?.t?.f?/, /?m?t.?.f??/
• (US) IPA^(key): /?m?t.?.f??/
• (US, rare) IPA^(key): /?m?.t?.f?/
• Hyphenation: me?ta?phor
• Rhymes: -??(?)

Noun

metaphor (countable and uncountable, plural metaphors)

1. (uncountable, rhetoric) The use of a word or phrase to refer to something other than its literal meaning, invoking an implicit similarity between the thing described and what is denoted by the word or phrase.

   Coordinate term: simile (when the similarity is made explicit by the words like or as)
2. (countable, rhetoric) A word or phrase used in such implied comparison.
   • 1874, John Seely Hart, First Lessons in Composition, page 92,

     A Metaphor may be changed into a Simile, and also into plain language, containing neither metaphor nor simile. Thus:

     Metaphor. — Idleness is the rust of the soul.

     Simile. — As rust is to iron, so is idleness to the soul, taking away its strength and power of resistance.

     Plain. — Idleness takes away from the soul its strength and power of resistance.

   • 1979, Daniel Breazeale (translator), Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense [1873, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn], in Philosophy and Truth, page 84, quoted in 1998, Ian Markham, Truth and the Reality of God: An Essay in Natural Theology, page 103,

     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, seems 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.

3. (countable, graphical user interface) The use of an everyday object or concept to represent an underlying facet of the computer and thus aid users in performing tasks.

   desktop metaphor; wastebasket metaphor

Hypernyms

• (rhetoric): figure of speech, trope

Derived terms

Translations

See also

• analogy
• idiom
• metonymy, metonym
• simile
• allegory

Verb

metaphor (third-person singular simple present metaphors, present participle metaphoring, simple past and past participle metaphored)

1. (intransitive) To use a metaphor.
2. (transitive) To describe by means of a metaphor.

Anagrams

• prothema