Simile

A simile is a figure of speech in which thesubject 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, "Thesnow 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 twoobjects 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 — MayaAngelou
• 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 — VladimirMayakovsky
• 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 — WilliamShakespeare
• 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