What's the difference between metaphor and simile?

Metaphor


Definition:

  • (n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
  • (2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
  • (3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
  • (4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
  • (5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
  • (6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
  • (7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
  • (8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
  • (9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
  • (10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
  • (11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
  • (12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
  • (13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
  • (14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
  • (15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
  • (16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
  • (17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
  • (18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
  • (19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
  • (20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.

Simile


Definition:

  • (n.) A word or phrase by which anything is likened, in one or more of its aspects, to something else; a similitude; a poetical or imaginative comparison.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Merely being around Soames – who is bulky, self-assured, and often speaks in similes that involve things like spaniels, grandmothers, rhododendrons and oysters – evokes sensations of an earlier, stronger Britain.
  • (2) "My hope is that the similes will repair what gets broken by the biographies, in the same way that the natural world does.
  • (3) The poem is structured like a lament, the soldiers' epitaphs interspersed with direct translations of Homer's extended similes, each of which is transcribed, lullingly, twice over.
  • (4) It's hard not to describe this creature without resorting to multiple similes – it's like a mushroom, an umbrella, a beating heart, an alien lifeform – all of which diminish its glory, as indeed does the word "jellyfish".
  • (5) She has terrific way with ideas, simile (“as lazy as a corpse”) and visual takes: “There are many women on the Kurfürstendamm.
  • (6) And some of her lyrics, even viewed coldly on a page, are impressive: "I carve lyrics into cubicle doors like they were pyramid walls and these were hieroglyphs, hold pen with an iron grip, my mind is the storm and the words are the eye in it," she raps on one track, and yet when she adds, "Evil in the world, stay peaceful in spite of it; 'cause snakes have never understood the way the lions live", you don't think, wow, amazing, you think – nice simile, but what on earth do you mean?
  • (7) Andrew Cooper, Conservative peer: ‘It is no accident that Fallon used Miliband’s political fratricide as his simile’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Cooper.
  • (8) Then comes the powerful simile of the cigarette "like a fire lit by a survivor".
  • (9) Another debate speaker launched a simile about a broken-legged camel that was cruelly cut off by the red light.)
  • (10) Even the name Jeremy Hunt is so redolent of upper-class brutality that it feels like he belongs in one of those Martin Amis books where working-class people are called things like Dave Rubbish and Billy Darts (No shade, Martin – I’m just a joke writer: I envy real writers, their metaphors and similes taking off into the imagination sky like big birds or something).
  • (11) Furthermore, from knowledge of the enzyme kinetics of the system we have been able to build a model of the pathway that allows us computer similation of its behavior and calculation of the Flux Control Coefficient profile at different glucose concentrations.
  • (12) Six parasite species (Phyllodistomum simile, Crowcrocaecum testiobliquum, Crepidostomum metoecus, Cyathocephalus truncatus, Truttaedacnitis truttae and Dentitruncus truttae) were recovered.
  • (13) But Wodehouse's pre-eminent stylistic flourish is his use of metaphor and simile: "Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes"; a man "wilts" like "a salted snail" – and one finds the same in his letters.
  • (14) Hence a "simil-estrogen", more than an "anti-estrogen" mechanism of action is postulated and a selection of patients for treatment in the "mid postmenopausal age" is recommended.
  • (15) In the Gospels, the metamorphosis caused by the epileptic seizure is used as a simile for Christ's transfiguration through suffering, death, and resurrection.
  • (16) If this seems a slightly odd simile, bear in mind Greek medics were not familiar with dissection and so could only observe protruding tumours.)
  • (17) The result was a hydrothorax that allowed a severe cardiac simile tamponed syndrome.
  • (18) Of course, it is no accident that the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, chose to use Miliband’s political fratricide as his simile.
  • (19) In 1846 Hebra, under the name of Seborrhea Congestiva described disc-shaped patches and introduced the butterfly simile for the malar rash.
  • (20) "One of the reasons I repeat the similes is that you need time off from the grief," Oswald explains.