analogy
Pluralanalogies
- 1A comparison between two things based on their resemblance, used especially as a basis for explanation or for drawing further conclusions.
The lawyer drew an analogy between this case and a famous earlier ruling.
His favorite analogy compared the economy to a living organism that grows and contracts.
Similarcomparison, parallel, correspondence, likeness
Oppositecontrast
Note
The everyday sense still carries its Greek root, logos, "speech, reckoning": an analogy is a reasoned comparison, not a loose resemblance. Its classic shape is the proportion. Time put it this way in 1983: hardware is to software as a television set is to its shows. That is the ratio sense in plain clothes. Between joins the two things compared; in marks where the likeness turns up, as when Emerson finds the heart's rhythm in love's ebb and flow.
- 2The tendency of a word or phrase to follow the regular patterns of a language, as seen in how its words are normally formed and inflected.
The past tense "dived" arose by analogy with other regular verbs.
Speakers extended the plural ending through analogy, reshaping several older irregular forms.
Note
Linguists use the word for a force as much as a relation. Speakers reshape irregular or isolated forms to fit the dominant patterns of their language, leveling old plurals and past tenses toward more productive models. The usual construction is by analogy with, followed by the model form. The term covers both the fit itself, a form that matches how the language ordinarily builds words, and the pressure that creates that fit.
- 3Equality between two ratios; a proportion in which one pair of quantities relates to each other as another pair does.
Euclid built much of his geometry on the analogy of equal ratios.
The proof depends on an analogy between the matching sides of the two triangles.
Similarproportion
Note
Geometry's name for a proportion: the statement that a is to b as c is to d, written a:b = c:d. Classical geometry made it the foundation of its theory of proportion, the ground beneath similar figures and commensurable magnitudes. Here the "reckoning" in the word's Greek root is meant literally. The likeness lies between ratios rather than between things, which is what separates it from the everyday comparison.
Practice
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Origin
From Latin analogia, itself from Ancient Greek ἀναλογίᾱ (analogíā), formed from the prefix ἀνα- (ana-) plus λόγος (lógos, 'speech, reckoning').