Students, what is the difference between an idiom and a metaphor?
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Idioms are fixed expressions with specific meanings, while metaphors are comparisons between two unlike things that create new meanings.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things by stating that one thing is another. For example instead of saying " He is very brave" you say " He is lion" comparing him to a lion to show how brave he is. So metaphor is like saying one thing is another thing to make your point more interesting. An idiom is a phrase or expression whose meaning cannot be understood from the literal meaning of its individual words. An idiom is like a secret code in a language. For example when we say " it's raining cats and dogs " we don't mean that animals are falling from the sky. Instead we mean that it's raining heavily.
In Metaphor you make a comparison between two unlike items that are not literally like each other but at some sense they might have similarities. Idiom is a phrase which its meaning is not detected from the words used and the whole meaning of it is not literal.
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while an idiom is a phrase or a saying used to describe a situation,a metaphor is an indirect comparison to describe something.For example,describing a rainy day as ''raining cats and dogs'' is an idiom,not a metaphor,because it's not comparing rain to anything that makes sense. It's just an expression that means''raining a lot.A metaphor that describes a rainy day would be ''The sky is a weeping child.''
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