Simile

A simile () is a type of figure of speech that directly compares two unrelated things, using wording to explicitly make the comparison (often, with a grammatical structure of the type "x is like y"). It is usually understood specifically to entail figurative comparison: thus "a wolf is like a dog" is merely a literal comparison, whereas the figurative "a man is like a wolf" is a simile. In the words of Michael Israel, Jennifer Riddle Harding, and Vera Tobin, "basically, a simile is just a way of describing a target by asserting its similarity to some unexpected entity".