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dead metaphor

noun

Definitions

  1. A former metaphor which has in effect lost its metaphorical status and become literal.

    • An objectivist might grant that digest an idea was once a metaphor, but he would claim that it is no longer metaphorical. For him it is a “dead metaphor,” one that has become conventionalized and has its own literal meaning.
    • Typically, dead metaphors have been considered a characteristic of ordinary language, and live metaphors a crucial trait of poetic language.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for dead metaphor. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA