dead metaphor

English

Noun

Examples
brand new electric current (electricity was at first thought to be analogous to water) laughing stock to go belly-up

dead metaphor (plural dead metaphors)

1. (linguistics) A former metaphor which has in effect lost its metaphorical status and become literal.
   • 1980, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, chapter 27, in Metaphors We Live By:

     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.

   • 2009, Cornelia Müller, Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 36:

     Typically, dead metaphors have been considered a characteristic of ordinary language, and live metaphors a crucial trait of poetic language.

   • 2021, Meghan O'Gieblyn, chapter 1, in God, Human, Animal, Machine […] , →ISBN:

     It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the twenty-first century […] . It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept, like an empty carapace that remains intact years after its animating organism has died.

Usage notes

• A metaphor that has become clichéd through overuse may be called stale rather than dead.

See also

• literalization

Further reading

• dead metaphor on Wikipedia.Wikipedia