How to Use metaphor in a Sentence

metaphor

noun
Definition of metaphornext
Synonyms for metaphornext
  • Her poems include many imaginative metaphors.
  • What did the metaphor of the black crab and the ice mean to you?
    — Sasha Urban, Variety, 18 Mar. 2022
  • And the city is sort of the metaphor for that and the image for that.
    — Jevon Phillips, Los Angeles Times, 21 Nov. 2023
  • But for all the rhetoric of war, the shape of the metaphor remains fuzzy.
    — Greg Jackson, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021
  • Is the search for a cure for the son a metaphor for healing the city?
    — Martin Dale, Variety, 25 Nov. 2023
  • So finding that metaphor was the key to the whole thing.
    — Chris Willman, Variety, 3 Mar. 2022
  • The scenes serve as a metaphor of Marib's place in Yemen.
    — Nic Robertson, Nada Bashir and Charbel Mallo, CNN, 23 Apr. 2021
  • For some the plane is a metaphor for a city ready for a liftoff.
    — Graham Ambrose, BostonGlobe.com, 11 June 2018
  • And just like a house can be a metaphor, so can a band.
    — Jazz Monroe, Pitchfork, 1 Mar. 2024
  • All those moves on the board are a metaphor for the bigger game of life.
    — Stephen Humphries, The Christian Science Monitor, 24 Nov. 2020
  • That seems like the perfect metaphor for tech in a lot of ways.
    — NBC News, 10 Mar. 2020
  • In a weird way, this works as a metaphor for the film itself.
    — Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, 12 Apr. 2018
  • That felt like a metaphor for so many things, and not in a good way.
    — Marissa Miller, Teen Vogue, 1 Feb. 2018
  • Who needs a metaphor in times as hot and blunt as ours?
    — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Harper's BAZAAR, 16 Aug. 2023
  • The metaphor fits just well enough for Julavits to make her point.
    — Jessica Ferri, Washington Post, 28 June 2023
  • Bayazid called it a black hole — and a perfect metaphor.
    — Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post, 8 Mar. 2018
  • Winthrop used the phrase as a metaphor for the new world settlement.
    — The Rev. Mike Taylor, baltimoresun.com/maryland/carroll, 12 Sep. 2020
  • That’s why the irony is carats, using this metaphor of bling.
    — Isabela Raygoza, Billboard, 18 Jan. 2024
  • And summer doesn’t live up to the old metaphors anymore.
    — Lydia Millet, TIME, 2 Apr. 2024
  • Tedros used the metaphor of a race almost – but not quite – won.
    — Kent Sepkowitz, CNN, 19 Sep. 2022
  • There was no concept of the user; that was not part of the metaphor at all.
    — Adam Fisher, WIRED, 10 July 2018
  • Nowhere is the chasm clearer than in the metaphors each side chooses.
    — Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times, 18 Dec. 2023
  • The metaphor is that John Wick is hard to kill, and Keanu is equally hard to kill.
    — Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone, 25 Mar. 2023
  • The first episode whizzing five years into the future is kind of a metaphor.
    — Liz Shannon Miller, The Verge, 2 July 2019
  • Suzume ends up finding it, and that, to me, was a metaphor for Suzume’s loss.
    — Jazz Tangcay, Variety, 15 Apr. 2023
  • Which brings us back, once again, to that central metaphor of the glass onion.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 7 Nov. 2022
  • The wood is, among other things, a metaphor for a library.
    — Laura Miller, The New Yorker, 7 Sep. 2020
  • The maze, in a way, serves as a metaphor for an organism’s life.
    — Sophia Chen, Wired, 9 June 2020
  • If the tree is a metaphor for this year, then maybe things are looking brighter.
    — Jeff Suess, The Enquirer, 27 Nov. 2020
  • But using the black and white keys on a piano as a metaphor is…um...
    — Troy L. Smith, cleveland, 13 May 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'metaphor.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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