Lexic.us

Definition of Personification

1. Noun. A person who represents an abstract quality. "She is the personification of optimism"

2. Noun. Representing an abstract quality or idea as a person or creature.

3. Noun. The act of attributing human characteristics to abstract ideas etc..

Definition of Personification

1. n. The act of personifying; impersonation; embodiment.

Definition of Personification

1. Noun. A person, thing or name typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification. ¹

2. Noun. A figure of speech, prosopopeia, in which an inanimate object or an abstraction is given human qualities. ¹

3. Noun. An artistic representation of an abstract quality as a human ¹

¹ Source: wiktionary.com

Definition of Personification

1. [n -S]

Lexicographical Neighbors of Personification

personated personates personating personation personations personative personator personators personeities personeity

personhood personhoods personifacation personifacations personification (current term) personifications personified personifier personifiers personifies

personify personifying personize personized personizes personizing personlike personnel personnel carrier

Literary usage of Personification

Below you will find example usage of this term as found in modern and/or classical literature:

1. Elements of Criticism by Henry Home Kames (1870)
"But it is evident, from numberless instances, that personification is not always so complete: it is a common figure in descriptive poetry, understood to be ..."

2. Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1891)
"Effect of Language in formation of Myth—Material personification primary, Verbal personification secondary—Grammatical Gender, male and female, ..."

3. A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric: A Text-book for Schools and Colleges by John Seely Hart (1892)
"personification. personification consists in attributing life to things ... But there may be Apostrophe without personification, as in the lament of David ..."

4. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1840)
"ON personification. PABT II. ... attempted to explain, and illustrate by familiar or forcible examples, the feelings by which personification is prompted, ..."

5. Manual of English Rhetoric by Andrew Dousa Hepburn (1875)
"the germ of personification, but it is more convenient to class them with the tropes, and confine personification to those forms in which inanimate objects, ..."

6. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews by Robert Lowth (1829)
"THE last in order of those figures, which I proposed to treat of, as being most adapted to the parabolic style, is the Prosopopoeia, or personification. ..."

7. Philological Studies: With English Illustrations by Josiah Willard Gibbs, Karl Ferdinand Becker (1857)
"personification of the members of the human body; as, Job 29: 11, ‘When the ear heard me, then it blessed ... This species of personification is peculiarly ..."

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