Figurative language is language that means something other than — or more than — its literal denotation. When a writer says “the city sleeps,” the city is not literally asleep; the writer is using personification to describe stillness. When a writer says “her words were a knife,” the words are not literally a knife; the writer is using metaphor to describe the effect of speech.
Figurative language is not ornament. It is a way of thinking — of understanding one thing in terms of another. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By (1980) that figurative language reflects the structure of human thought: we understand time as space (“looking forward to it”), arguments as war (“she attacked his position”), and ideas as objects (“grasping a concept”). Writers who use figurative language well are not decorating their prose — they are making visible the connections their minds draw between things.
The major figures include:
- Metaphor — identification: “the world is a stage.”
- Simile — comparison using “like” or “as”: “the world is like a stage.”
- Personification — giving human qualities to nonhuman things: “the wind whispered.”
- Hyperbole — deliberate exaggeration: “I’ve told you a million times.”
- Irony — saying one thing while meaning another: “What lovely weather” during a storm.
- Analogy — extended comparison to explain: “DNA is like a blueprint.”
- Metonymy — substituting an associated term: “the Crown” for the monarchy.
- Synecdoche — substituting a part for the whole: “all hands on deck.”
Figurative language fails when it is clichéd (“light at the end of the tunnel”), mixed (“we need to grab the bull by the horns and run with it”), or forced (a metaphor that doesn’t illuminate the thing it describes). George Orwell advised: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print” [@orwell1946]. The advice is not to avoid figurative language but to make it fresh — to find the comparison that reveals something the reader hasn’t seen before.
Related terms
- metaphor — the most powerful and pervasive figure
- simile — explicit comparison
- imagery — concrete sensory language, often figurative
- diction — figurative language is a dimension of word choice
- connotation — figurative language works through associative meaning