Word of the Day:
hyperbole
What It Means
Deliberate overstatement, particularly extreme overstatement.
An instance or example of such overstatement.
A hyperbola.
Hyperbole in Context
“The honourable gentleman forces us to hear a good deal of this detestable rhetoric; and then he asks why, if the secretaries of the Nizam and the King of Oude use all these tropes and hyperboles, Lord Ellenborough should not indulge in the same sort of eloquence?”
Did You Know?
From Middle English iperbole, yperbole, from Latin hyperbolē, from Ancient Greek ὑπερβολή (huperbolḗ, “excess, exaggeration”), from ὑπέρ (hupér, “above”) + βάλλω (bállō, “to throw”, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *gʷelH-). Doublet of hyperbola.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hyperbole (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “hyperbole.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hyperbole. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.