simile

thumb|The Madonna album Like a Virgin, in whose title track the narrative persona uses a simile, professing to be experiencing an erotic relationship "like a virgin". A simile () is a type of figure of speech that directly compares two unrelated things, using wording to explicitly make the comparison (often, with a grammatical structure of the type "x is like y"). It is usually understood specifically to entail figurative comparison: thus "a wolf is like a dog" is merely a literal comparison, whereas the figurative "a man is like a wolf" is a simile. In the words of Michael Israel, Jennifer Riddle Harding, and Vera Tobin, "basically, a simile is just a way of describing a target by asserting its similarity to some unexpected entity".

In English, similes are often made explicit by the word "like", as in "Odysseus is like a weasel", but the comparison in a simile can be made explicit in quite different ways, as in "the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent is the fashion equivalent of the breakup of the Beatles". Sometimes, extra information is included to explain precisely how the comparison is intended to work, as in "my kitchen is approximately the size of a postage stamp".