hyperbole

plural hyperboles

1. rhetoricuncountableliteratureDeliberate overstatement, particularly extreme overstatement.

   Hyperbole soars too high, or creeps too low, Exceeds the truth, things wonderful to shew.

   1835, L[arret] Langley, “[The Seven Tropes.] Hyperbole.”, in A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster, South Yorkshire: […] C. White, […], →OCLC, page 12

   5 more examples

   The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.

   1837 March 6, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Legends of the Province House”, in Twice-Told Tales, Boston, Mass.: American Stationers Co.; John B. Russell, →OCLC

   "Nay, nay, good Sumach," interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole, with patience[…]

   1841, J[ames] Fenimore Cooper, chapter VIII, in The Deerslayer: A Tale. […], 1st British edition, volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 248

   Of course the hymn has come to us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own soil—which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.

   1913, Theodore Roosevelt, “Productive Scholarship”, in History as Literature, and Other Essays

   The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. […] That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

   1987, Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal, New York: Random House, →ISBN, page 40

   In these circumstances, hyperbole is called for, the rhetorical figure that raises its objects up, excessively, way above their actual merit : it is not to deceive by exaggeration that one overshoots the mark, but to allow the true value, the truth of what is insufficiently valued, to appear.

   1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, in Cigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published 1993, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 17

   Synonyms: overstatement, exaggeration, auxesis · Antonyms: understatement

2. countableAn instance or example of such overstatement.

   […]and when he ſpeakes, / 'Tis like a Chime a mending. With tearmes vnſquar' / Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropt, / Would ſeemes Hyperboles

   c. 1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii], column 2

   1 more example

   The honourable gentleman forces us to hear a good deal of this detestable rhetoric; and then he asks why, if the secretaries of the Nizam and the King of Oude use all these tropes and hyperboles, Lord Ellenborough should not indulge in the same sort of eloquence?

   1843, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Gates of Somnauth

3. countableobsoletegeometryA hyperbola.