Simile

A simile is a figure of speech in which the subject is compared to another subject, for example, "as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs". Frequently, similes are marked by use of the words like or as, "The snow was like a blanket". However, "The snow blanketed the earth" is also a simile and not a metaphor because the verb blanketed is a shortened form of the phrase covered like a blanket.

The phrase "The snow was a blanket over the earth" is the metaphor in this case. Metaphors differ from similes in that the two objects are not compared, but treated as identical, "We are but a moment's sunlight, fading in the grass."

List of notable similes

She was like a pretty kite that floated above my head —Maya Angelou
Love is like the devil; whom it has in its clutches it surrounds with flames —Honoré de Balzac
Exuding good will like a mortician's convention in a plague year —Daniel Berrigan
Guiltless forever, like a tree —Robert Browning
Idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As good as gold —Charles Dickens
Yellow butterflies flickered along the shade like flecks of sun —William Faulkner
Woo the moon like the tide —Vladimir Mayakovsky
Death has many times invited me: it was like the salt invisible in the waves —Pablo Neruda
Solitude...is like Spanish moss which finally suffocates the tree it hangs on —Anaïs Nin
Jubilant as a flag unfurled —Dorothy Parker
Wide sleeves fluttering like wings —Marcel Proust
Death lies on her, like an untimely frost —William Shakespeare
The trees wavered their stark shadows across the snow like supplicating arms —Leo Tolstoy
A mouth drawn in like a miser's purse —Émile Zola