Simile

A simile is a figure of speech in which the subject is compared to another subject, for example, "as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs". Frequently, similes are marked by use of the words like or as, "The snow was like a blanket". However, "The snow blanketed the earth" is also a simile and not a metaphor because the verb blanketed is a shortened form of the phrase covered like a blanket.

The phrase "The snow was a blanket over the earth" is the metaphor in this case. Metaphors differ from similes in that the two objects are not compared, but treated as identical, "We are but a moment's sunlight, fading in the grass."

See also tertium comparationis.

List of notable similes

  • Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully —Raymond Chandler
  • She was like a pretty kite that floated above my head —Maya Angelou
  • Love is like the devil; whom it has in its clutches it surrounds with flames —Honoré de Balzac
  • Exuding good will like a mortician's convention in a plague year —Daniel Berrigan
  • Guiltless forever, like a tree —Robert Browning
  • Idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • As good as gold —Charles Dickens
  • Yellow butterflies flickered along the shade like flecks of sun —William Faulkner
  • Woo the moon like the tide —Vladimir Mayakovsky
  • Death has many times invited me: it was like the salt invisible in the waves —Pablo Neruda
  • Solitude...is like Spanish moss which finally suffocates the tree it hangs on —Anaïs Nin
  • Jubilant as a flag unfurled —Dorothy Parker
  • Wide sleeves fluttering like wings —Marcel Proust
  • Death lies on her, like an untimely frost —William Shakespeare
  • The trees wavered their stark shadows across the snow like supplicating arms —Leo Tolstoy
  • A mouth drawn in like a miser's purse —Émile Zola
  • A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle; Irina Dunn, 1970


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