Supermetaphor
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A grounding fact; a correspondance between the underlying truth and our ideas and constructions based on that truth.
"In this way he promotes landscape into a supermetaphor, in order to expose a general tendency towards equalization."
- 2 An overarching metaphor; a metaphor that encompasses several sub-metaphors.
"The third chapter focuses on the theme of alcohol, which is a sort of "supermetaphor" of poetic distillation, encompassing all the other metaphors."
- 3 A metaphor that is particularly widespread or dominant.
""Mother" as supermetaphor for "man's projection of the ideal" is dealt a final blow by McBride's organized exposition of the alternative: female parents and male parents — "because no one sex and no one person should be responsible for..."
- 4 A metaphor about metaphors.
"Driven by the demands of undergraduate teaching, Morgan wanted to translate Sociological Paradigms into a work that would appeal not only to academics and students of organization but also to practitioners. In pursuit of this aim, he alighted upon what we might characterize as a super-metaphor: the idea that “all theories are metaphorical.”"
Example
More examples"In this way he promotes landscape into a supermetaphor, in order to expose a general tendency towards equalization."
Etymology
From super- + metaphor.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.