dead metaphor

English

Noun
Examples

dead metaphor (plural dead metaphors)

  1. (linguistics) A former metaphor which has in effect lost its metaphorical status and become literal. Not to be confused with stale metaphor (a type of cliché), although it often is.
    • 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.

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Further reading
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