hyperbole — English Dictionary

Noun

1. Deliberate overstatement, particularly extreme overstatement.

   Usage

   • rhetoric
   • Uncountable

   Synonyms

   overstatementexaggerationauxesis

   Antonyms

   understatement

   Examples

   Hyperbole soars too high, or creeps too low, Exceeds the truth, things wonderful to shew.

   The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.

   More examples (7)

   "Nay, nay, good Sumach," interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole, with patience[…]

   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.

   The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. […] That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. 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.

   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.

   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.

   Trump has always believed in “truthful hyperbole,” as he called it in “The Art of the Deal.” But now it’s untruthful hyperbole.

   Of course, Altman has a penchant for hyperbole, and OpenAI—like the rest of the AI industry—likes to tout each new model as the best ever.

2. An instance or example of such overstatement.

   Usage

   • Countable

   Examples

   […]and when he ſpeakes, / 'Tis like a Chime a mending. With tearmes vnſquar' / Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropt, / Would ſeemes Hyperboles

   More examples (1)

   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?

3. A hyperbola.

   Usage

   • Countable
   • Obsolete

Noun

1. extravagant exaggeration

   Synonyms

   exaggeration

   Broader terms

   tropefigure of speechfigureimage