Word Finder - personification

definition

A person, thing or name typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification.

example

Adolf Hitler was the personification of anti-Semitism.

definition

A literary device in which an inanimate object or an idea is given human qualities.

example

The writer used personification to convey her ideas.

definition

An artistic representation of an abstract quality as a human

He was the personification of evil.

She is the personification of the earth suffering from drought, on which the fertilizing rain descends from heaven.

Her bright and airy living room decor is the personification of spring.

It was the personification of an abstract idea.

Kant regarded the devil as a personification of the radical evil in man.

A swarm of bees hived in a straw skep, the picturesque little domicile known the world over as the personification of industry, will furnish their home with waxen combs in form and shape so admirably adapted to their requirements as to need no improvement by man.

Daena, the ideal personification of law and religion, is the object of praise and sacrifice.

Hopkins creates the personification of evil and a character that defines what man is capable of doing to man.

At the primitive stage, however, the degree of personification is, probably, often far slighter than the words used would seem to suggest.

In the Odyssey, she is the wife of Hephaestus, her place being taken in the Iliad by Charis, the personification of grace and divine skill, possibly supplanted by Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.

Though nominally the servant of the States of Holland he made himself politically the personification of the province which bore more than half the entire charge of the union, and as its mouthpiece in the states-general he practically dominated that assembly.

Even in the most ancient sources, the female personification of cities is associated with symbols of weddings.

Again, because a hero is said to have stolen or brought fire, we need not regard that hero as the personification of fire, and explain all his myth as a fire-myth.

Many nature religions, such as animism, believe that everything found in nature has a personification, a spirit.

Reinach sees in him the fox roaming " in the darkness," to the Thracians a personification of the wine-god, torn in pieces by the Bassarae (fox-maidens).

The Gnosis of which they profess themselves adherents is a personification, the won and mediator "knowledge of life" (see below).

Ariadne is the personification of spring.

Male twins, often drawn as warriors, are the personification of Gemini.

This can help when you're naming various characters and you desire to assign a name that will be a good personification of the character or at the least convey a few of her or his personal traits.

Miguel (q.v.) a personification of the hero-king Sebastian, whose second advent had been expected for two and a half centuries.

Kolar's principal poem is the Slavy dcera (daughter of Slavia), a personification of the Slavic race.

Gnomes, sylphs and nereids are introduced on almost every page, and personification is carried to an extraordinary excess.

Its importance was revived by Augustus, who added to these Lares his own Genius, the religious personification of the empire.

This goddess became the personification of money, and her name was applied both to money and to its place of manufacture.

This latter theory, which in many cases is equivalent to personification, though it may be, like animism, a feature of the philosophy of peoples of low culture, should not be confused with it.

Darkness is likewise a spiritual kingdom (more correctly, it also is conceived of as a spiritual and feminine personification), but it has no "God" at its head.

The personification of Britannia as a female figure may be traced back as far as the coins of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (early 2nd century A.D.); its first appearance on modern coins is on the copper of Charles II.

The belief in them probably arose out of the doctrine of the older school, which did not deny the existence of the various creations of previous mythology and speculation, but allowed of their actual existence as spiritual beings, and only deprived them of all power over the lives of men, and declared them to be temporary beings liable, like men, to sin and ignorance, and requiring, like men, the salvation of Arahatship. Among them the later Buddhists seem to have placed their numerous Bodhisats; and to have paid especial reverence to Manju-sri as the personification of wisdom, and to Avalokiteswara as the personification of overruling love.

In classic mythology the personification does not exist; but Comus appears in the EIKOvES, or Descriptions of Pictures, of Philostratus, a writer of the 3rd century A.D.

According to the usual tradition, he was born at Thebes - originally the local centre of his worship in Greece - and was the son of Zeus, the fertilizing rain god, and Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, a personification of earth.

Modern authorities have explained them as the personification of the waves of the sea or of the barren, unproductive coast of Libya; or as the awful darkness of the storm-cloud, which comes from the west and is scattered by the sun-god Perseus.

That personification is, as a rule, anthropomorphic, but traces of theriomorphic personification are still very apparent.

This personification is entirely natural to the Oriental, and though "primitive" is not necessarily an ancient trait.

There is the same kind of personification, fresh examples of the "prophetical interpretation of history," and by the side of the older "primitive" thought are ideas which can only belong to this later period.

In the German mythology the army of darkness is led by Hel, the personification of twilight, sunk to the goddess who enchains the dead and terrifies the living, and Loki, originally the god of fire, but afterwards "looked upon as the father of the evil powers, who strips the goddess of earth of her adornments, who robs Thor of his fertilizing hammer, and causes the death of Balder the beneficent sun."

Woods, who began the final round only two shots back of the leader, was the very personification of a curious day.

This is a poetic way of thinking about it, via the poetic trope of personification.

Finally, a narrative reading of Isaiah 53 was offered, with a focus on the literary trope of personification.

Some modern mythologists regard the Minotaur as a solar personification and a Greek adaptation of the Baal-Moloch of the Phoenicians.

Typhon is thus the personification of volcanic forces.

This fact is again attested by Nabonidus, whose record 5 mentions that the Istar worship of Agade was later superseded by that of the goddess Anunit, another personification of the Istar idea, whose shrine was at Sippar.

Wladislaus was the personification of helpless inertia.

Under the later reigns the Tyche figure (the personification of a Greek city) becomes common as a coin type (Wroth, Coins of Parthia, pp. liii., lxxiv.).

The personification of Scorpio being a jealous lover is no exaggeration.

In the Odyssey, where they are represented as bringing round the seasons in regular order, they are an abstraction rather than a concrete personification.

Thus he describes the Loves of the Plants according to the Linnaean system by means of a most ingenious but misplaced and amusing personification of each plant, and often even of the parts of the plant.

Hestia is the goddess of the family union, the personification of the idea of home; and as the city union is only the family union on a large scale, she was regarded as the goddess of the state.

In the Orphic cosmogony the origin of all goes back to Chronos, the personification of time, who produces Aether and Chaos.

As a war-goddess, she is the embodiment of prudent and intelligent tactics, entirely different from Ares, the personification of brute force and rashness, who is fitly represented as suffering defeat at her hands.

The contention for Homer, in short, began at a time when his real history was lost, and he had become a sort of mythical figure, an " eponymous hero," or personification of a great school of poetry.