No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From songs and television shows to conversations and advertisements, we often ...

We can imagine someone saying “my love is literally a rose,” but that is to use “literally”  metaphorically, as an emphatic adverb, like “really.” ...

Read aloud picture books and look for simile examples and metaphor examples to learn how writers use figurative language to ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares one thing to another without using “like” or “as.” This guide explains the definition, workings, and impact of metaphors in literature and daily life.

Source: Francesco Bini/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 The most famous of all allegories is the Allegory of the Cave, in which Plato compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their ...