personification
Use Personification in a sentence
əRelated forms
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
Cite This Source
| a white, crystalline, water-insoluble solid, C14H9Cl5, usually derived from chloral by reaction with chlorobenzene in the presence of fuming sulfuric acid: used as an insecticide and as a scabicide and pediculicide: agricultural use prohibited in the U.S. |
| (used as a nonsense word by children to express approval or to represent the longest word in English.) |
personification (pɜːˌsɒnɪfɪˈkeɪʃən) ![[Click for IPA pronunciation guide]](http://static.sfdict.com/dictstatic/g/d/dictionary_questionbutton_default.gif) | |
| —n | |
| 1. | the attribution of human characteristics to things, abstract ideas, etc, as for literary or artistic effect |
| 2. | the representation of an abstract quality or idea in the form of a person, creature, etc, as in art and literature |
| 3. | a person or thing that personifies |
| 4. | a person or thing regarded as an embodiment of a quality: he is the personification of optimism |
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source
personification
Cite This Source
personification
figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. An example is "The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare" (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," 1807). Another is "Death lays his icy hand on kings" (James Shirley, "The Glories of Our Blood and State," 1659). Personification has been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in allegory; for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair, Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. Personification became almost an automatic mannerism in 18th-century Neoclassical poetry, as exemplified by these lines from Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard": Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:Fair science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Learn more about personification with a free trial on Britannica.com.
Cite This Source
