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Thesaurus: dead metaphor

a metaphor that has occurred so often that it has become a new meaning of the expression (e.g., ‘he is a snake’ may once have been a metaphor but after years of use it has died and become a new sense of the word ‘snake’)

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Definitions

  1. n. a word/metaphor">metaphor that has word/occurred">occurred so often that it has become a new meaning of the expression (e.g., ‘he is a snake’ may once have been a metaphor but after years of use it has died and become a new sense of the word ‘snake’)