Word Finder - exaggeration

definition

The act of heaping or piling up.

definition

The act of exaggerating; the act of doing or representing in an excessive manner; a going beyond the bounds of truth, reason, or justice; a hyperbolical representation; hyperbole; overstatement.

definition

A representation of things beyond natural life, in expression, beauty, power, vigor.

He is notorious for his wilful exaggeration, both in narrative and numerical statements.

But there was exaggeration in all he attempted.

Surely that was an exaggeration - infidelity had to be worse.

I always figured that was an exaggeration.

This is an exaggeration.

To say, however, that he studied English literature would be an exaggeration.

Tennyson, who only knew the Arthurian story through the medium of Malory, has, by exaggeration, largely contributed to this misunderstanding.

A true introduction to Colorado mountain winters, the ones you read about in the books and think are the exaggeration of some faulty memory.

The linear scale of maps can obviously be used only in the case of maps covering a small area, for in the case of maps of greater extension measurements would be vitiated owing to the distortion or exaggeration inherent in all projections, not to mention the expansion or shrinking of the paper in the process of printing.

But it would be an exaggeration to say, as some have done, that the poor are represented as being the heirs of a blessed hereafter, simply on the ground that they are now poor.

True, her view of life is highly coloured and full of poetic exaggeration; the universe, as she sees it, is no doubt a little better than it really is.

The indiscriminate use of Mercator's projection, for maps of the world, is to be deprecated owing to the inordinate exaggeration of areas in high latitudes.

They had from early times a very complicated system of superstitious medicine, or religion, related to disease and the cure of disease, borrowed, as is thought, from the Etruscans; and, though the saying of Pliny that the Roman people got on for six hundred years without doctors was doubtless an exaggeration, and not, literally speaking, exact, it must be accepted for the broad truth which it contains.

Swift's grave humour and power of enforcing momentous truth by ludicrous exaggeration were next displayed in his Modest Proposal for Preventing the' Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, by fattening and eating them (1729), a parallel to the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, and as great a masterpiece of tragic as the latter is of comic irony.

She lands standing up - well, slight exaggeration.

They battled with great vigor and exaggeration to the cheering of the three younger boys until one turned and noticed her.

No writer shows a juster scorn of all mere rhetoric and exaggeration.

Speaking generally, the Celtic heroes are differentiated from the Teutonic by the extreme exaggeration of their superhuman, or rather extra-human, qualities.

While in England, he published Sketches of Canada and the United States, in which, with some exaggeration, many of the Canadian grievances were exposed.

He was a born agitator, and as such tended to exaggeration and misrepresentation.

Much exaggeration was permitted to a Roman orator.

One is the exaggeration of the possibilities of resolution into separate elements that is due to the acceptance of the postulate of an alphabet of nature.

The number of the uncivilized Indians, whose camps or villages are situated in open glades among the forests of the plateau region, is usually estimated at 30,000; but this would seem to be an exaggeration.

Although the assertion of the celebrated Rhys Prichard of Llandovery that in his time (c. 1630) only 1% of the people of Wales could read the native language is probably an exaggeration, yet the number of persons who could read and write Welsh must have been extremely small outside the ranks of the clergy.

There has doubtless been exaggeration as to certain details, and the story of his seraglio at the Parc aux cerfs is largely apocryphal.

There is much of unconscious exaggeration in all this.

Though not altogether free from exaggeration and flattery, it is marked by considerable dignity and self-restraint, and is thus more important as an historical document than similar productions.

But a certain exaggeration of emphasis may be pardoned in a writer seeking to attract the attention of an indifferent public. It was not, however, as a theorist dealing with the fundamental data of economic science, but as a brilliant writer on practical economic questions, that Jevons first received general recognition.

This persecution is described with great vividness, and no doubt with some exaggeration, by the nearly contemporary Victor Vitensis.

In the rhetorical exaggeration of the famous tenth satire, for instance, the highest energies of patriotism - the gallant and desperate defence of great causes, by sword or speech - are quoted 1..

Yet even in this, his most characteristic talent, his proneness to exaggeration, the attraction which coarse and repulsive images have for his mind, and the tendency to sacrifice general effect to minuteness of detail not infrequently mar his best effects.

Its chief employment was to lay things bare and sever them from their surroundings, in order that they might be contemplated in their simplicity, with rigid exactness, as objects of thought, apart from the illusion and exaggeration that attends them when presented to sense and imagination.

It may be said without exaggeration that the Portuguese of the " age of discoveries " and the Portuguese of the 17th and later centuries were two different races.

The statement, moreover, that some eight millions of Indians perished through forced labour in the mines is a gross exaggeration.

If he lacks the genius of Claudian, he also lacks his overloaded gaudiness and his large exaggeration, and the directness of Rutilius shines by comparison with the laboured complexity of Ausonius.

The story told in the memoirs of the French ambassador Bassompierre, that he was killed by the heat of a brasero (a pan of hot charcoal), because the proper official to take it away was not at hand, is a humorous exaggeration of the formal etiquette of the court.

Nestorianism had sprung from an exaggeration of the theology of the school of Antioch, and the schism weakened that patriarchate and its dependencies.

In this the burlesque exaggeration of the pleasures of eating and drinking, which is one of the chief exterior notes of the whole work, is pushed to an extreme - an extreme which has attracted natural but perhaps undue attention.

In all such pictures we must allow a good deal for exaggeration both ways, but there must be a ground-work of truth.

The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual.

It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.

We read frequently, in the classical books, of the " ten thousand states " in which the people were distributed, but that is merely a grand exaggeration.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, in the English school since Hume, psychology superseded properly philosophical inquiry.

That he was slow, and perhaps too tender-hearted, in handling armed masses for action may be admitted, and though admirable for defensive war and a safe strategist, he showed himself unfitted to take the highly essential initiative, both because of temperament and his habitual exaggeration of obstacles and opposing numbers.

The very earnestness with which Spener had insisted on the necessity of a new birth, and on a separation of Christians from the world, led to exaggeration and fanaticism among followers less distinguished than himself for wisdom and moderation.

This is probably an exaggeration.

Both sides promised to lay down their arms, to dismiss their mercenaries, and to acquiesce in the destruction of unlicensed castles, of which it is said, with no very great exaggeration, that there were at the moment over 1000 in the realm.

He sincerely believed that the exaggeration and exaltation of the popular editor of the Pesti Hirlap would cast the nation back into the old evil conditions from which it had only just been raised, mainly by Szechenyi's own extraordinary efforts, and in Kelet nepe, which is also an autobiography, he prophetically hinted at an approaching revolution.

According to his own statements, which often tend to exaggeration, he was offered both the sees of Bangor and Llandaff, but refused them.

Shortness of stature' is their most obvious characteristic, though in regard to this much exaggeration has prevailed.