RRhetoric
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Irony & Understatement

Hyperbole

hy-PER-buh-lee / haɪˈpɜːrbəliː

Exaggeration past literal belief, trusting the reader to scale it back. The point is not to deceive but to show intensity: the size of the overstatement measures the size of the feeling.

"I had to wait in the station for ten days — an eternity." — Conrad

Don't confuse it with Litotes, Bathos. Its opposite pole is understatement/litotes. When exaggeration collapses into the trivial for comic effect, that's bathos.

Drill this device — 26 excerpts

In the Reader — 26 excerpts

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet · open the passage →
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
— William Shakespeare, King Lear · open the passage →
When all at once I saw a crowd,
— William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes · open the passage →
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice · open the passage →
Through caverns measureless to man
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep · open the passage →
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Examiner · open the passage →
…the negro Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary · open the passage →
…and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · open the passage →
The trumpets sounded, and instantly the arena was cleared for the race. The people shouted in a frenzy of gladness, and the earth and the air seemed to tremble with the transport.
— Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ · open the passage →
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia · open the passage →
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest · open the passage →
Rugs could not be too good for him.
— D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers · open the passage →
in his bed into a gigantic insect.
— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (trans. David Wyllie) · open the passage →
flow of human blood in human veins.
— Langston Hughes, The Crisis · open the passage →
turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God · open the passage →
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones · open the passage →
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems · open the passage →
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road · open the passage →
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart · open the passage →
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart · open the passage →
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart · open the passage →
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel · open the passage →
The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day, without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.
— Don DeLillo, White Noise · open the passage →
Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.
— Han Kang, The Vegetarian · open the passage →

…and 2 more. Meet the rest in the quiz →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with hyperbole most often — company reveals character.

Metaphor 12 Anaphora 10 Passive Voice 9 Litotes 9 Parallelism 8 Antithesis 7 Personification 7 Asyndeton 7

The rest of the family

Irony Litotes Meiosis / Understatement Bathos Euphemism Periphrasis Apophasis