metaphors

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of metaphor.

   Her essay relied on extended metaphors drawn from gardening.

   Sports commentators reach for war metaphors during a close game.

   Note

   The plural belongs only to the countable uses of metaphor. As the general practice of figurative speech, metaphor takes no plural (the poem works through metaphor). Metaphors are individual figures, each a word or phrase carrying an implied comparison. Software design borrows the same countable sense for everyday objects that stand in for a computer's workings, so interface metaphors take the plural just as rhetorical ones do.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of metaphor. Rare.

   Note

   Here the noun has become a verb, and the -s ending does double duty: the spelling is identical to the noun plural. A subject in front of the word marks it as the verb. It works two ways: transitively, usually with as (she metaphors grief as winter), and intransitively, meaning simply to use a metaphor (he metaphors constantly).

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