Simile

Simile is an Italian musical term meaning "similarly"; it indicates that the performer should continue to apply the preceding directive, whatever it was. For example, a series of dynamic changes to be repeated in many measures would make the music crowded and harder to read if written out in full, so the engraver might insert a simile directive after the first measure of the changes. The performer would then know to continue the dynamic pattern in the following measures.

A simile is a figure of speech in which the subject is compared to another subject, for example, "as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs". Frequently, similes are marked by use of the words like or as, "The snow was like a blanket". However, "The snow blanketed the earth" is also a simile and not a metaphor because the verb blanketed is a shortened form of the phrase covered like a blanket.

The phrase "The snow was a blanket over the earth" is the metaphor in this case. Metaphors differ from similes in that the two objects are not compared, but treated as identical, "We are but a moment's sunlight, fading in the grass."

See also tertium comparationis.

List of notable similes

• Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully —Raymond Chandler
• She was like a pretty kite that floated above my head —Maya Angelou
• Love is like the devil; whom it has in its clutches it surrounds with flames —Honoré de Balzac
• Exuding good will like a mortician's convention in a plague year —Daniel Berrigan
• Guiltless forever, like a tree —Robert Browning
• Idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• As good as gold —Charles Dickens
• Yellow butterflies flickered along the shade like flecks of sun —William Faulkner
• Woo the moon like the tide —Vladimir Mayakovsky
• Death has many times invited me: it was like the salt invisible in the waves —Pablo Neruda
• Solitude...is like Spanish moss which finally suffocates the tree it hangs on —Anaïs Nin
• Jubilant as a flag unfurled —Dorothy Parker
• Wide sleeves fluttering like wings —Marcel Proust
• Death lies on her, like an untimely frost —William Shakespeare
• The trees wavered their stark shadows across the snow like supplicating arms —Leo Tolstoy
• A mouth drawn in like a miser's purse —Émile Zola
• A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle; Irina Dunn , 1970