Glossary Term of the Day:

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent and/or compare a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea. AThe comparison can be made directly [i](for example, John Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)]/i] or less directly as in Shakespeare’s “Marriage of Two Minds” excerpted below:

excerpt from Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Metaphor makes comparison without pointing out a similarity by using words such as “like,” “as,” or “than.” The word metaphor derives from the 16th century Old French métaphore, in turn from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over."