Simile

A simile is a figure of speech that compares two unrelated things directly, "using wording to explicitly make the comparison," typically along the pattern "x is like y." The Latin similis means "similar, like." Only figurative comparisons count: "a man is like a wolf" is a simile, while the literal "a wolf is like a dog" is not. The article's examples include Burns's "O My Luve's like a red, red rose" and Shakespeare's "So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

Against metaphor the difference is volume: "like" and "as" announce the comparison, so a simile reads softer and a metaphor more forceful, and the article records two schools of thought, one treating the figures as mutually exclusive, the other treating similes as a subcategory of metaphor. For the writer the risks are repetition and ornament: similes arrive three to a paragraph in rough drafts, and unearned ones are the raw material of purple prose. The test is whether an image adds perception the plain sentence lacks, the habit show, don't tell trains.