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Metaphor vs Benchmark - What's the difference?

metaphor | benchmark |

As nouns the difference between metaphor and benchmark

is that metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like or as, which would imply a simile while benchmark is a standard by which something is evaluated or measured.

As a verb benchmark is

to measure the performance of (an item) relative to another similar item in an impartial scientific manner.

metaphor

Noun

  • (uncountable, figure of speech) The use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like'' or ''as , which would imply a simile.
  • * What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors''', metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are '''metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.'' — Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , 1870, translated by Daniel Beazeale, 1979.
  • (countable, rhetoric) The word or phrase used in this way. An implied comparison.
  • Hypernyms

    * figure of speech

    Derived terms

    * dead metaphor * extended metaphor * malaphor * metaphorical * metaphorical extension * metaphoricity * metaphorism * stale metaphor

    See also

    * analogy * idiom * metonymy * simile

    benchmark

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A standard by which something is evaluated or measured.
  • * 2013 , Martina Hyde, Is the pope Catholic?'' (in ''The Guardian , 20 September 2013)[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/20/is-pope-catholic-atheists-gay-people-abortion]
  • Is the pope Catholic? Forgive the posing of a question that is usually rhetorical, the absolute benchmark of certainty, and traditionally regarded as even more settled than the one pertaining to the lavatorial arrangements of bears.
  • A surveyor's mark made on some stationary object and shown on a map; used as a reference point.
  • (computing) A computer program that is executed to assess the performance of the runtime environment.
  • Verb

    (en verb)
  • To measure the performance of (an item) relative to another similar item in an impartial scientific manner.
  • References