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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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| 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. |
| the estimation of something as valueless (encountered mainly as an example of one of the longest words in the English language). |
- Boone is worthy of historical attention as a personification of the westward movement.
- Loki is the personification of sin.
- But the personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be primitive.
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personification
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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.
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