How Many Types of Metaphor Are There?
About six core types — standard, implied, extended, dead, mixed and conceptual — though lists range from four to a dozen. But the count is the boring part. The surprise is the last type: conceptual metaphors you don’t just speak but actually think in, dozens of them, running silently under everyday language. Two thousand years ago Aristotle called a gift for metaphor the surest sign of genius. He had no idea how much of it we use on autopilot.
The basic metaphor: it declares that one thing simply is another.
So how many are there, really?
No source agrees on a tidy number, because “type” is doing a lot of work. The six in the explorer above are the ones almost every list includes; stretch the definitions and you can name visual metaphors, compound metaphors, absolute metaphors and more. The honest answer is the one the explorer gives: a small, well-defined core, plus a long tail of fine distinctions.
First, clear up the most common mix-up. A simile says one thing is like another (“brave as a lion”); a metaphordrops the “like” and claims they are the same (“he is a lion”). Same comparison, bolder move. And every metaphor, simple or grand, has the same three parts the critic I. A. Richards named in 1936: the tenor (the real subject), the vehicle (the borrowed image), and the ground (what they share) — the breakdown the explorer shows for each type.
Extended metaphor: the type that goes the distance
Most metaphors are over in a phrase. An extended metaphor refuses to stop: it takes one comparison and develops it across line after line, finding fresh correspondences as it goes. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” doesn’t just call life a play and move on — it runs the idea through the seven ages of man, casting infancy, schoolboy, lover, soldier and old age as successive scenes. The metaphor becomes a whole argument.
When an extended metaphor is especially elaborate or surprising, it earns its own name: a conceit. The metaphysical poets were masters of it — John Donne, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633), compares two parted lovers to the two legs of a drawing compass, one fixed, one roaming, forever leaning toward home. To write your own, pick a vehicle rich enough to keep yielding parallels, then chase them honestly rather than forcing them: a good extended metaphor discovers, it doesn’t pad.
The metaphors you think with
In 1980 the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made a claim that reshaped the field: metaphor isn’t mainly a poetic decoration — it is how the mind handles abstract ideas at all. As they put it, the essence of metaphor is understanding one kind of thing in terms of another, and we do it constantly without noticing. We argue as if war (attack, defend, win), spend time as if it were money, and treat ideas as food.
The telling part is that these aren’t universal laws but cultural habits. A society that pictured argument as a dance rather than a battle would think about disagreement differently. If this is the type that fascinates you, the everyday side of it has its own page: how many metaphors we use every day.
When metaphors die — and when they collide
Two more types are really what happens to metaphors over time. A dead metaphor has been used so often that we no longer feel the picture in it — the “foot” of a mountain, the “head” of a company, the hands of a clock. They were vivid once; now they are simply words. A mixed metaphor is the opposite mishap: two live images crashing into each other, like “we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it” or “it’s not rocket surgery.” The collision is usually an accident, and almost always funny — which is why comedians reach for it on purpose.
The classroom was a zoo.
Sources
- George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980) — conceptual metaphor theory and the ARGUMENT IS WAR / TIME IS MONEY examples.
- I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) — the tenor / vehicle / ground terms for the parts of a metaphor.
- Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II (“All the world’s a stage”) and Romeo and Juliet, Act II (“Juliet is the sun”).
- John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633) — the compass conceit; Aristotle, Poetics, on metaphor as the mark of genius.
Count the types if you like, but the real number to sit with is the one you can’t count: the metaphors already doing your thinking before you choose a single word.