personification
Personification is a figure that endows a non-personal carrier with human behaviour (speech, deed, will); foil to metaphor, allegory, and symbol.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Definitions
- ling. / rhet. / lit. Trope: a thing, event in nature, or abstract notion is credited with personal marks (deed, utterance, affect, volition). Axis: granting personhood to a non-personal carrier, not a single metaphor likeness and not an allegory image chain.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - hist. lex. Lexicon notes: Webster 1913 marks PERSONIFICATION (Per*son`i*fi*ca"tion) and PERSONIFY (Per*son"i*fy); Skeat 1910 under PERSON lists person-i-fy with the matching -fication noun and PROSOPOPOEIA; Arct 1921 keeps Personifikacja; Brückner 1927 omits a dedicated card.
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Editorial team; facts: Webster 1913 (PERSONIFICATION Per*son`i*fi*ca"tion; PERSONIFY Per*son"i*fy); W. W. Skeat 1910 (PERSON Der. person-i-fy; person-i-fic-at-ion; PROSOPOPOEIA); M. Arct 1921 (Personifikacja; Personifikować); A. Brückner 1927 (no personifikacja lemma), open source - didact. / rhet. In language and literature teaching, personification sits beside metaphor, allegory, irony, euphemism, and hyperbole: metaphor is one likeness transfer, allegory develops a coherent image chain with a second sense plane, personification grants human traits to a non-personal carrier. Scope of the borders needs review.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - colloq. Everyday talk may dump any lively image under this tag. This entry holds one rhetorical axis: deliberate assignment of person-like behaviour to an object, a natural force, or an abstract idea, foil to a single metaphor transfer and foil to an allegory image chain.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Examples
- A line where the wind shouts and the door sighed is textbook personification (human marks on a natural event and a thing); a neighbour wrongly filed a single metaphor in the same exercise.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - The morning block drilled personification; metaphor notes returned as the one-transfer foil, and allegory stood beside as the image-chain with a second plane.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - Reading list: the 1913 Webster cards for the noun and the verb, Skeat 1910 under PERSON (person-i-fy; PROSOPOPOEIA), the 1921 Arct Polish pair, and Brückner 1927 (no separate lemma).
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - Treating every personification as plain metaphor erased the human-traits-versus-one-transfer split at once.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - Board order: personification, metaphor, allegory, irony, so granting personhood stayed apart from one transfer, from an image chain, and from sense reversal.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Usage
Casual talk may stamp any lively image as personification with no named axis. Seminar work peels layers: deliberate granting of personal traits (action, speech, feeling, will) to a non-personal carrier; metaphor as foil (one likeness transfer); allegory as foil (image chain); plus lexicon notes. Webster keeps PERSONIFICATION and PERSONIFY. Skeat under PERSON gives person-i-fy (Johnson) and person-i-fic-at-ion, plus PROSOPOPOEIA. Arct keeps Personifikacja. Brückner skips a separate lemma. Without those layers only an empty lively-image slogan remains.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Open-book record. The 1913 Webster volume marks the noun Per*son`i*fi*ca"tion (French-comparison etymology) and the verb Per*son"i*fy (Person + -fy). Skeat under PERSON cites a late coined verb from Johnson and the matching -fication noun; PROSOPOPOEIA points to Gk. prosopon + poiein. The 1921 Arct volume keeps both Polish lemmas; the 1927 Brückner volume skips a dedicated card. Facts here; derivation under etymology.
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Editorial team; facts: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 (PERSONIFICATION; PERSONIFY); W. W. Skeat 1910 (PERSON; PROSOPOPOEIA); M. Arct 1921 (Personifikacja; Personifikować); A. Brückner 1927 (no separate lemma), open sourceScholarly English marks granting of human marks to a non-personal carrier. Careful editors discard worksheets that treat every metaphor as personification and discard glosses that never name the personhood axis. The personification / metaphor / allegory border stays debated in seminars. Chronology of the label stays blank until a primary source page is cited. Polish counterpart: personifikacja (SGJP present).
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Classrooms revisit personhood-granting talk in tropes and set personification against metaphor, allegory, irony, euphemism, hyperbole, litotes, metonymy, synecdoche, rhetoric, and semantics. CMUdict has the personification lemma (pipeline IPA). Polish personifikacja sits in SGJP. Already live: allegory, metaphor, irony, euphemism, hyperbole, litotes, metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron, rhetoric, semantics. Without the human-traits axis the label collapses.
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Editorial team; facts: Webster 1913 (PERSONIFICATION); CMUdict (personification present); SGJP / Morfeusz 2 (personifikacja present), open sourceWord forms
Countable noun: singular personification / plural personifications. Related forms in Skeat/Webster: personify, personifier. CMUdict lemma present.
forms in use
| przypadek | forma |
|---|---|
| singular | personification |
| plural | personifications |
| verb | personify (Webster / Skeat person-i-fy) |
| agent noun | personifier (Webster PERSONIFIER) |
Word forms: Editorial team; facts: Webster 1913 (PERSONIFICATION; PERSONIFY; PERSONIFIER); W. W. Skeat 1910 (person-i-fy; person-i-fic-at-ion); CMUdict (personification present) · source
Collocations
- literary personification
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - personification of an abstract
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - personification versus metaphor
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - granting human marks to a natural event
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - distinguish personification from allegory
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Synonyms · Antonyms
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Editorial team; facts: W. W. Skeat 1910 (PROSOPOPOEIA), open sourcesource
Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Etymology
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W. W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., Oxford 1910 (PERSON Der. person-i-fy; person-i-fic-at-ion; PROSOPOPOEIA), open sourcealso
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 (PERSONIFICATION: Per*son`i*fi*ca"tion; PERSONIFY: Per*son"i*fy), open sourcealso
M. Arct, Słownik wyrazów obcych, 9th ed., Warsaw 1921 (Personifikacja; Personifikować), open sourcealso
A. Brückner, Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego, Kraków 1927 (no personifikacja lemma), open sourceRelated words
- allegory , foil along the construct axis (image chain, not a personhood grant); EN pair already live
- metaphor , foil along the scale axis (one likeness transfer); EN pair already live
- irony , trope neighbour; EN pair already live
- euphemism , trope neighbour (etiquette softening); EN pair already live
- hyperbole , foil along the scale axis (overstatement); EN pair already live
- litotes , trope neighbour (understatement); EN pair already live
- metonymy , trope neighbour (contiguity transfer); EN pair already live
- synecdoche , trope neighbour (part for whole); EN pair already live
- oxymoron , trope neighbour (contrary pair); EN pair already live
- rhetoric , domain of tropes; EN pair already live
- semantics , sense and transfer neighbour; EN pair already live
- personifikacja , Polish counterpart (SGJP present; Arct Personifikacja; Webster PERSONIFICATION)
Related entries
The same entry in Polish: personifikacja
Questions and answers
What does personification mean?
The word names a setup where a non-personal carrier gets personal marks: deed, utterance, feeling, or will. Metaphor stays at one transfer. Allegory stays at an image chain. Irony reverses sense. Hyperbole stretches.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)How does personification differ from metaphor?
Personification grants personal traits to an object, phenomenon, or abstract idea. Metaphor stays at one likeness transfer alone. Casual speech blurs them often; the rhetorical axis differs clearly.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)How does personification differ from allegory?
Personification deliberately grants human marks to one non-personal carrier. Allegory leads a chain of concrete persons, events, or images toward set abstract contents. That is the scale and construct foil, not a synonym.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Where does the word personification come from, and what forms sit with it?
Skeat 1910 ties the noun to PERSON: late person-i-fy (Johnson citation) yields the -fication form; PROSOPOPOEIA sits nearby. Webster 1913 marks PERSONIFICATION and PERSONIFY; PERSONIFIER is related. Arct 1921: Personifikacja; Personifikować. Brückner 1927 omits a dedicated card. Forms: personification / personifications. IPA from CMUdict: /pɚˌsɑnəfəˈkeɪʃən/. Polish pair: personifikacja (SGJP present).