a metaphor for something

metaphor | American Dictionary

metaphor
noun[ C/U ]
us/ˈmet̬·əˌfɔr, -fər/
literature
an expression that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to possess similar characteristics:
[ C ]"A heart of stone" is a metaphor.

metaphorical

adjectiveus/ˌmet̬·əˈfɔr·ɪ·kəl, -ˈfɑr-/
metaphorical expressions

Examples of metaphor

metaphor
The geographical metaphor is particularly useful when discussing the internal structure of a program, and hence it tends to predominate in more technical texts.
We have applied the same idea to teaching music by arguing for body movement as a physical metaphor between musical activities and conceptual thinking.
There are phenomena that occur only at certain scales, and which thereby are poor models or metaphors for other levels.
One method of making this prior knowledge explicit is to examine the metaphors preservice teachers use during their practice teaching.
This property alone has fundamental consequences for the solutions that we expect from any model that is based on that metaphor.
Ghosts may seem to elude serious scholars except as metaphor or atmosphere, but there is a surprising abundance of books about them.
In this magnum opus he used biological metaphors to analyse the functioning of a national economic system and elaborate a detailed typology of socio-economic phenomena.
With respect to the problem of invisibility, the crystal metaphor offers an elegant solution.
Indeed, rhythm becomes a complicated metaphor for sexuality in the song, a metaphor set up through the dual working of verbal and rhythmic meaning.
His enthusiasm for his subject produces some excessive stylistic flourishes, dramatic metaphors, rhetorical questions.
This metaphor naturally lends itself to an intuitive graphical representation of connectors and their composition that strongly resembles (asynchronous) electronic circuit diagrams.
To follow the metaphor of landscape, we suggest an apparatus for environmental change that is like a cloud.
It would have been tempting to let the metaphor decide, say by exiting into a cloister, or by retrograde back the way one came.
Through consideration of both traditional instruments and new technology-driven interfaces, we explore the role that metaphor plays in developing expressive devices.
Concerning art practice, 'rhizome' can be adapted as a metaphor of speaker cables.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withmetaphor

metaphor

These are words often used in combination with metaphor.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

central metaphor
The vast body of evidence presented and referred to in the target article demonstrates the heuristic value of the centralmetaphor.
conceptual metaphor
Indeed, elaborations at this more specific level may, perhaps more plausibly, give rise to the more general abstractions in evidence in conceptualmetaphor theory.
extended metaphor
It is difficult to do justice to a work of scholarship that is written in the form of an extendedmetaphor.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
See all collocations with metaphor