FromMiddle Englishiperbole,yperbole, fromLatinhyperbolē, fromAncient Greekὑπερβολή(huperbolḗ,“excess, exaggeration”), fromὑπέρ(hupér,“above”) +βάλλω(bállō,“I throw”,ultimately fromProto-Indo-European*gʷelH-).[1][2]Doublet ofhyperbola.
hyperbole (countable anduncountable,pluralhyperboles)
- (uncountable, rhetoric, literature)Deliberateorunintentionaloverstatement,particularlyextremeoverstatement.
- Synonyms:overstatement,exaggeration,auxesis
- Antonym:understatement
1835, L[arret] Langley, “[The Seven Tropes.] Hyperbole.”, inA Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster, South Yorkshire: […] C. White, […],→OCLC,page12:Hyperbole soars too high, or creeps too low,
Exceeds the truth, things wonderful to shew.
1837 March 6, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Legends of the Province House”, inTwice-Told Tales, Boston, Mass.: American Stationers Co.; John B. Russell,→OCLC:The great staircase, however, may be termed, without muchhyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.
1841,J[ames] Fenimore Cooper, chapter VIII, inThe Deerslayer: A Tale. […], 1st British edition, volume III, London:Richard Bentley, […],→OCLC,page248:"Nay, nay, good Sumach," interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to suchhyperbole, with patience[…]
1913,Theodore Roosevelt, “Productive Scholarship”, inHistory as Literature, and Other Essays: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 inhyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
1987,Donald Trump,Tony Schwartz,The Art of the Deal, New York: Random House,→ISBN,page40:The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies.[…] That's why a littlehyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthfulhyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.
1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, inCigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published1993,→ISBN,→OCLC,page17: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.
2001, Tom Bentley, Daniel Stedman Jones,The Moral Universe:The perennial problem, especially for the BBC, has been to reconcile thehyperbole-driven agenda of newspapers with the requirement of balance, which is crucial to the public service remit.
2025 June 28, Maureen Dowd, “Obfuscating on Obliterating”, inThe New York Times[1],→ISSN:Trump has always believed in “truthfulhyperbole,” as he called it in “The Art of the Deal.” But now it’s untruthfulhyperbole.
2025 August 7, Matteo Wong, “The New ChatGPT Resets the AI Race”, inThe Atlantic[2]:Of course, Altman has a penchant forhyperbole, and OpenAI—like the rest of the AI industry—likes to tout each new model as the best ever.
- (countable) Aninstance orexample ofsuchoverstatement.
c.1602,William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, inMr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, andEd[ward] Blount, published1623,→OCLC,[Act I, scene iii], column 2:[…]and when he ſpeakes, / 'Tis like a Chime a mending. With tearmes vnſquar' / Which from the tongue of roaringTyphon dropt, / Would ſeemesHyperboles
1843,Thomas Babington Macaulay,The Gates of Somnauth: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 andhyperboles, Lord Ellenborough should not indulge in the same sort of eloquence?
- (countable, geometry, obsolete) Ahyperbola.
rhetorical device
- Afrikaans:hiperbool
- Arabic:مُبَالَغَةٌ (ar) m(mubālaḡatun)
- Catalan:hipèrbole (ca) f
- Chinese:
- Mandarin:誇張法 /夸张法 (zh)(kuāzhāngfǎ)
- Czech:nadsázka (cs) f
- Danish:hyperbel c
- Dutch:hyperbool (nl)
- Esperanto:hiperbolo
- Finnish:hyperbola (fi)
- French:hyperbole (fr) f
- Galician:hipérbole (gl) f
- Georgian:ჰიპერბოლა(hiṗerbola),გაზვიადება(gazviadeba),გადამეტება(gadameṭeba),გადიდება(gadideba)
- German:Hyperbel (de) f,Übertreibung (de) f
- Greek:υπερβολή (el) f(ypervolí)
- Ancient:ὑπερβολή f(huperbolḗ)
- Gujarati:અતિશયોક્તિ(atiśyokti)
- Hindi:अत्युक्ति (hi) f(atyukti),अतिशयोक्ति (hi) f(atiśyokti)
- Hungarian:túlzás (hu),(rarely)nagyítás (hu),(rarely)hiperbola (hu)
- Irish:urtheilgean m,hipearbóil f
- Italian:iperbole (it) f
- Japanese:誇張 (ja)(Kochō)
- Korean:과장(誇張) (ko)(gwajang)
- Latin:hyperbole f,nimietas,superlatio
- Maori:kupu whakapehapeha
- Norwegian:
- Bokmål:hyperbol (no) m
- Nynorsk:hyperbol m
- Polish:hiperbola (pl) f
- Portuguese:hipérbole (pt) f
- Romanian:hiperbolă (ro) f
- Russian:гипе́рбола (ru) f(gipérbola),преувеличе́ние (ru) n(preuveličénije)
- Spanish:hipérbole (es) f
- Swedish:hyperbol (sv) c
- Tagalog:sawig
- Telugu:అతిశయోక్తి (te)(atiśayōkti)
- Thai:อติพจน์ (th),อธิพจน์ (th)
- Turkish:abartıcılık (tr)
- Ukrainian:гіпе́рбола (uk) f(hipérbola)
- Welsh:gormodiaith f
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FromMiddle Frenchhyperbole,yperbole, alearned borrowing fromLatinhyperbolē, itself borrowed fromAncient Greekὑπερβολή(huperbolḗ,“excess, exaggeration”).
hyperbole f (pluralhyperboles)
- (rhetoric)hyperbole
- (geometry)hyperbola
- Coordinate term:parabole
FromAncient Greekὑπερβολή(huperbolḗ,“excess, exaggeration”), fromὑπέρ(hupér,“above”) +βάλλω(bállō,“I throw”).Doublet ofNew Latinhyperbola.
hyperbolē f (genitivehyperbolēs);first declension
- exaggeration,hyperbole
First-declension noun (Greek-type).
- “hyperbole”, inCharlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879),A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- “hyperbole”, inGaffiot, Félix (1934),Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
