Wiktionary

hyperbole

English

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WOTD – 5 May 2006
 
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Etymology

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From Latin hyperbolē, from Ancient Greek ὑπερβολή (huperbolḗ, “excess, exaggeration”), from ὑπέρ (hupér, “above”) + βάλλω (bállō, “I throw”). Doublet of hyperbola.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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hyperbole (countable and uncountable, plural hyperboles)

  1. (uncountable, rhetoric, literature) Deliberate or unintentional overstatement, particularly extreme overstatement.
    • [1835, L[arret] Langley, A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster: Printed by C. White, Baxter-Gate, →OCLC, page 12:
      Hyperbole soars too high, or creeps too low,
      Exceeds the truth, things wonderful to shew.      ]
    • 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Legends of the Province House:
      The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.
    • 1841, J[ames] Fenimore Cooper, chapter VIII, in The Deerslayer: A Tale. […], 1st British edition, volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 248:
      "Nay, nay, good Sumach," interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole, with patience […]
    • c. 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, Productive Scholarship
      Of course the hymn has come to us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own soil—which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
    • 1987, Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal, page 58:
      The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. ..People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.
    • 1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, in Cigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published 1993, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 17:
      In these circumstances, hyperbole is called for, the rhetorical figure that raises its objects up, excessively, way above their actual merit : it is not to deceive by exaggeration that one overshoots the mark, but to allow the true value, the truth of what is insufficiently valued, to appear.
    • 2001, Tom Bentley, Daniel Stedman Jones, The Moral Universe:
      The perennial problem, especially for the BBC, has been to reconcile the hyperbole-driven agenda of newspapers with the requirement of balance, which is crucial to the public service remit.
  2. (countable) An instance or example of such overstatement.
  3. (countable, obsolete) A hyperbola.

Synonyms

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Antonyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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See also

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French

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Etymology

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Learned borrowing from Latin hyperbole, itself borrowed from Ancient Greek ὑπερβολή (huperbolḗ, “excess, exaggeration”).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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hyperbole f (plural hyperboles)

  1. (rhetoric) hyperbole
  2. (geometry) hyperbola
    Coordinate term: parabole
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Descendants

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  • → Turkish: hiperbol

Further reading

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Latin

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Etymology

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From Ancient Greek ὑπερβολή (huperbolḗ, “excess, exaggeration”), from ὑπέρ (hupér, “above”) + βάλλω (bállō, “I throw”).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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hyperbolē f (genitive hyperbolēs); first declension

  1. exaggeration, hyperbole

Declension

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First-declension noun (Greek-type).

Case Singular Plural
Nominative hyperbolē hyperbolae
Genitive hyperbolēs hyperbolārum
Dative hyperbolae hyperbolīs
Accusative hyperbolēn hyperbolās
Ablative hyperbolē hyperbolīs
Vocative hyperbolē hyperbolae

References

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  • “hyperbole”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  • hyperbole in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
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