simile

The simile is arresting: modern European proponents of welfare-state liberalism likened to a dying class of 19th-century hereditary nobles, confident in their rightness and desperate to rest.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 5, 2025

I love that simile because she did refer to her wardrobe as an “impenetrable fortress.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2025

“The simile with the DNA is more a metaphor but in some way, there exists the connection as mentioned for solving paths.”

From Salon ● Nov. 13, 2024

Second row Samuel Slade's simile, comparing his team's ability to adapt to a pokemon, was the most audacious attempt and when the poker faces started to slip.

From BBC ● Oct. 6, 2023

But soon they found an explanation, which he illustrates with a looser simile: We’re all used to gravity being a force that does only one thing: pull objects toward each other.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

In a 1944 letter, he noted that he sometimes found Welty’s gorgeous metaphors and similes a distraction, “touching something outside the story so vividly that for a moment the mind shifts away from the theme.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 27, 2025

Another song, “Runaway Train,” is an upbeat collaboration with Jon Randall that wouldn’t be out of place on mainstream country radio, savoring its similes: “You’ve got a heart like a runaway train/screaming down the mountainside.”

From New York Times ● Jan. 24, 2024

Boras then went into one of his similes and word plays.

From Seattle Times ● Nov. 8, 2023

Ted came to England as a broken man with a gentle smile on his face, a head full of homespun similes, cornpone puns and a heart bursting with Midwestern niceness.

From Salon ● Jun. 1, 2023

Though no writer can avoid idioms altogether—they’re part of the English lexicon, just like individual words—good writers reach for fresh similes and metaphors that keep the reader’s sensory cortexes lit up.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker