Metaphor
Metaphor enters English in the fifteenth century from Latin *metaphora*, itself a direct borrowing from Greek *μεταφορά* (metaphorá), meaning *transfer* or *carrying across*. The Greek noun derives from the verb *μεταφέρειν* (metaphérein), built from two components: the prefix *μετά* (metá), signifying *across, beyond, after*, and the verb *φέρειν* (phérein), *to carry, to bear*. The word did not begin as a term of rhetoric. It began as a description of physical transport.
Etymology and Root Analysis
The verb *φέρειν* descends from the Proto-Indo-European root *\*bher-*, one of the most productive roots in the entire Indo-European family — meaning *to carry, to bear*. From this same root come Latin *ferre* (to carry), Old English *beran* (to bear), Sanskrit *bhárati* (he carries), and Greek *phérō* (I carry). The word metaphor is therefore a direct cousin of bear, birth, burden, fertile, and transfer — all from the same prehistoric verb of carrying.
The prefix *metá* contributes its own semantic complexity. In Greek it could mean *with, across, beyond, after, change*, depending on context. The same prefix yields metabolism (*change of substances*), metamorphosis (*change of form*), method (*pursuit after a path*), and metaphysics (*after physics* — a label Aristotle's editors gave to a treatise placed after his *Physica*). To study metaphor is to study a word that etymologically *carries itself across* its own semantic boundaries.
Historical Journey
The earliest Greek uses of *metaphorá* are not literary-theoretical but practical: the word appears in administrative papyri referring to the physical transfer of goods, payments, or persons from one place to another. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BCE, appropriated this workaday term and gave it its canonical rhetorical meaning. In the *Poetics* (c. 335 BCE) he defines *metaphorá* as *the application of an alien name by transference* — specifically, carrying a name from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy. The etymological content — *carrying across* — was not incidental; it was exactly what Aristotle meant.
Latin *metaphora* appears by the first century BCE, used by Cicero and Quintilian in rhetorical treatises. Quintilian in the *Institutio Oratoria* (c. 95 CE) distinguishes metaphor from *translatio* (his Latin equivalent), noting that metaphor is among the most natural and universal figures of speech, present even in the language of farmers and common people. The term passed from Latin into medieval scholarly Latin without alteration, securing its place in grammatical and rhetorical curricula across Europe.
Middle English *metaphore* appears by c. 1450, with the spelling settling into modern form by the sixteenth century. English writers of the Renaissance, drawing on classical sources newly available through print, used the word extensively in treatises on rhetoric and poetry.
The System of Language
Within the semiotic framework that governs all linguistic signs, *metaphor* names a process that reveals the arbitrary nature of the signifier with unusual clarity. When a name — a sound-image — is detached from one concept and applied to another, the transfer demonstrates that no sign is permanently bonded to its referent. The linguistic community agrees, by convention, to extend coverage. Metaphor is therefore not an ornament added to language from outside; it is a symptom of how language actually works. Signs drift. Categories bleed. The relationship between signifier and signified is never fixed.
Cognates and Relatives
The *\*bher-* root gives English a family of words so widespread that the connections are genuinely unexpected to most speakers:
- Bear (the verb): directly from Old English *beran*, from *\*bher-* - Birth: from Old Norse *burðr*, from the same root - Burden: from Old English *byrthen*, a carrier, from *\*bher-* - Fertile: from Latin *fertilis*, *that which bears [fruit]*, from *ferre* - Circumference: Latin *circumferre*, to carry around - Difference: Latin *differre*, to carry apart — *metaphor* and *difference* are etymological siblings - Euphoria: Greek *euphoría*, *well-bearing* — the state of carrying oneself well - Christopher: Greek *Christophoros*, *bearer of Christ*
The word transfer is particularly close: Latin *transferre* = *trans* (across) + *ferre* (to carry) — effectively a Latin calque of the Greek *metapherein*.
Semantic Shift and Cultural Context
The movement from *physical transport* to *linguistic transference* is itself a metaphor — language used the concept of carrying to name the act of carrying meaning from one domain to another. This circularity is not accidental. Languages regularly draw on the vocabulary of physical movement and spatial relation to describe abstract cognitive operations. We *grasp* an idea, *follow* an argument, *reach* a conclusion. The transfer of the word *metaphorá* from logistics to rhetoric is an early and well-documented instance of this universal tendency.
By the twentieth century, cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in *Metaphors We Live By* (1980) that metaphor is not a special device of poetic language but the default structure of human conceptual thought. The etymological analysis of *metaphor* itself confirms this: the word names a structural feature of language using a structural feature of language.
Modern Usage
The word today operates simultaneously as a technical term in linguistics and rhetoric and as a general-purpose word for any non-literal comparison. This bifurcation — technical precision alongside everyday looseness — is itself a semantic drift, the kind of carrying-across that the word was coined to describe. The tool has become an example of its own mechanism.
At the level of the sign-system, *metaphor* is indispensable: it designates the process by which the entire vocabulary of abstraction was built — transferred piece by piece from the concrete world into the domain of thought.