List of Metaphors
| Metaphor | Meaning |
| A different tack | To try another way, Abruptly turns a boat |
| Account for | To be responsible for, Compensate for |
| Adrift | Floating freely without any direction, Aimless |
| Albatross | An animal’s body part, used metaphorically to mean as a burden that feels like a curse. |
| Arms race | Competition between two or more countries for superior military technology |
| Awash | Flooded with seawater or rain |
| Back and fill | To change one’s direction repeatedly, To vacillate in one’s action |
| Batten down the hatches | Prepare for trouble, Prepare for difficult time |
| Belling the cat | To take big risk, To perform dangerous task |
| Big red button | As a symbol of danger, Fictional button that controls a function of critical importance |
| Blind men and an elephant | A picture of relativism and tolerance,
Judging something without actually knowing or seeing |
| Brass monkey | Extremely Cold weather |
| Bucket brigade | A chain of persons acting to solve the big problem |
| Butterfly effect | Minute change in a complex system can have large effects some where else |
| By and large | On the whole, Primarily, Predominantly |
| Camel’s nose | Permitting of small act that will lead to a larger undesirable act or consequence |
| Chain reaction | A series of events |
| Chicken or the egg | Situation in which it is difficult to say which of the two things happens first |
| Chinese fire drill | A state of confusion |
| Clear the decks | To remove unnecessary things to get ready for action |
| Cold feet | Loss of confidence, Hesitate, Too much nervous to do something |
| Crossing the Rubicon | Cross the point of no return, To make an irreversible decision, To take an action with consequences |
| Crossroads | A point at which a crucial decision must be made |
| Cultural mosaic | People with different culture live together |
| Domino effect | A cumulative effect produced due to chain of similar events |
|
Don’t judge a book by its cover |
Do not prejudge the value of something |
| Duck trick | Deliberately play a trick lower than the opponent, To move swiftly to escape |
| Elephant in the room | An obvious truth going unnoticed, An obvious problem that people do not want to discuss about |
| Flagship | The chief one of any group, An organization which is a leader in producing best product |
| Fork in the road | To make a difficult decision about something like deciding for choice of university for further studies |
| Give someone a hand | To help somebody |
| Grey area | An area lacking clearly defined characteristics, A problem nobody know how to deal with as there are no clear rules |
| Ground zero | A point on the surface of earth directly above or below of nuclear explosion |
| Hobson’s choice | Free choice when there is no real alternative |
| Inverted pyramid | To illustrate about the priority and structure of any report in text |
| Jumping the gun | To start before the starting signal, To do something too soon |
| Left high and dry | Left helpless, Being in an abandoned position |
| Letting the cat out of the bag | To reveal a secret without intending to |
| Loaded to the gunwales | Under the influence of one or a variety of substance |
| Melting pot | A place where different types of people live together and later form one community, A pot in which metals are melted and mixed |
| Mother lode | Principle zone of gold or silver ore, Origin of something valuable in great abundance. |
| Nail one’s colours to the mast | State your opinion clearly about a subject |
| On one’s beam ends | In a bad situation |
| Ostrich effect | Avoiding a risky financial situation by pretending it does not exist |
| Plain sailing | Easy and smooth progress in an activity |
| Rosetta Stone | The breakthrough that provides crucial knowledge for solving a problem |
| Silver bullet | Something that immediately solves a crucial problem |
| Slippery slope | An action which leads to bad situation or disaster |
| Snowball effect | Something which starts small and get bigger and bigger very fast |
| Soapbox | A situation in which one express strong opinions about a specific topic |
| Spherical cow | Simplified scientific models of real life phenomena |
| Spill the beans | To reveal the secret |
| Taken aback | Surprised, Shocked |
| To the bitter end | Till the end of any work or process (Nothing to do with bitterness) |
| Turtles all the way down | When your own logic begins to fail for any argument |
| Unmoored | To loose from anchorage, To release from |
| Weathering a storm | Successfully deal with a critical and difficult situation or problem |
| Whipping boy | A scapegoat, A person who has been punished for somebody else’s faults |
| White elephant | An expensive possession that is useless and difficult to maintain |
| With flying colours | Excellently, With great success |
| Wooden face | With no interest in another’s talk |
| You have two cows | To demonstrate how any systems functions for currency, capital, means of production and property |
