Adjacent Words

Allegory definitions

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Webster's 1828 Dictionary

AL'LEGORY, n. [Gr. other, to speak, a forum, an oration.]
A figurative sentence or discourse, in which the principal subject is described by another subject resembling it in its properties and circumstances. The principal subject is thus kept out of view, and we are left to collect the intentions of the writer or speaker, by the resemblance of the secondary to the primary subject. Allegory is in words that hieroglyphics are in painting. We have a fine example of an allegory in the eightieth Psalm, in which God's chosen people are represented by a vineyard. The distinction in scripture between a parable and an allegory, is said to be that a parable is a supposed history, and an allegory, a figurative description of real facts. An allegory is called a continued metaphor. The following line in Virgil is an example of an allegory.
Claudite jam rivos, pueri, sat prata biberunt.
Stop the currents, young men, the meadows have drank sufficiently; that is let your music cease, our ears have been sufficiently delighted.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

n
1: a short moral story (often with animal characters) [syn: fable, parable, allegory, apologue]
2: a visible symbol representing an abstract idea [syn: emblem, allegory]
3: an expressive style that uses fictional characters and events to describe some subject by suggestive resemblances; an extended metaphor

Merriam Webster's

noun (plural -ries) Etymology: Middle English allegorie, from Latin allegoria, from Greek all?goria, from all?gorein to speak figuratively, from allos other + -?gorein to speak publicly, from agora assembly — more at else, agora Date: 14th century 1. the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression 2. a symbolic representation ; emblem 2

Britannica Concise

Work of written, oral, or visual expression that uses symbolic figures, objects, and actions to convey truths or generalizations about human conduct or experience. It encompasses such forms as the fable and parable. Characters often personify abstract concepts or types, and the action of the narrative usually stands for something not explicitly stated. Symbolic allegories, in which characters may also have an identity apart from the message they convey, have frequently been used to represent political and historical situations and have long been popular as vehicles for satire. E. Spenser's long allegorical poem The Faerie Queen is a famous example.

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. (pl. -ies) 1 a story, play, poem, picture, etc., in which the meaning or message is represented symbolically. 2 the use of such symbols. 3 a symbol. Derivatives: allegorist n. Etymology: ME f. OF allegorie f. L allegoria f. Gk allegoria f. allos other + -agoria speaking

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Allegory Al"le*go*ry, n.; pl. Allegories. [L. allegoria, Gr. ?, description of one thing under the image of another; ? other + ? to speak in the assembly, harangue, ? place of assembly, fr. ? to assemble: cf. F. all['e]gorie.] 1. A figurative sentence or discourse, in which the principal subject is described by another subject resembling it in its properties and circumstances. The real subject is thus kept out of view, and we are left to collect the intentions of the writer or speaker by the resemblance of the secondary to the primary subject. 2. Anything which represents by suggestive resemblance; an emblem. 3. (Paint. & Sculpt.) A figure representation which has a meaning beyond notion directly conveyed by the object painted or sculptured. Syn: Metaphor; fable. Usage: Allegory, Parable. ``An allegory differs both from fable and parable, in that the properties of persons are fictitiously represented as attached to things, to which they are as it were transferred. . . . A figure of Peace and Victory crowning some historical personage is an allegory. ``I am the Vine, ye are the branches'' [--John xv. 1-6] is a spoken allegory. In the parable there is no transference of properties. The parable of the sower [--Matt. xiii. 3-23] represents all things as according to their proper nature. In the allegory quoted above the properties of the vine and the relation of the branches are transferred to the person of Christ and His apostles and disciples.'' --C. J. Smith. Note: An allegory is a prolonged metaphor. Bunyan's ``Pilgrim's Progress'' and Spenser's ``Fa["e]rie Queene'' are celebrated examples of the allegory.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

(allegories) 1. An allegory is a story, poem, or painting in which the characters and events are symbols of something else. Allegories are often moral, religious, or political. The book is a kind of allegory of Latin American history. = parable N-COUNT: oft N of n 2. Allegory is the use of characters and events in a story, poem, or painting to represent other things. The poem's comic allegory was transparent.

Easton's Bible Dictionary

used only in Gal. 4:24, where the apostle refers to the history of Isaac the free-born, and Ishmael the slave-born, and makes use of it allegorically.

Every parable is an allegory. Nathan (2 Sam. 12:1-4) addresses David in an allegorical narrative. In the eightieth Psalm there is a beautiful allegory: "Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt," etc. In Eccl. 12:2-6, there is a striking allegorical description of old age.

International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

al'-e-go-ri: The term allegory, being derived from allo agoreuein, signifying to say something different from what the words themselves imply, can etymologically be applied to any figurative form of expression of thought. In actual usage in theology, the term is employed in a restricted sense, being used however in three ways, namely, rhetorically, hermeneutically and homiletically. In the first-mentioned sense it is the ordinary allegory of rhetoric, which is usually defined as an extended or continued metaphor, this extension expanding from two or more statements to a whole volume, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Allegories of this character abound in the Scriptures, both in Old Testament and in New Testament. Instructive examples of this kind are found in Ps 80:8-19; Ec 12:3-7; Joh 10:1-16; Eph 6:11-17. According to traditional interpretation of both the Jewish exegesis and of the Catholic and Protestant churches the entire book of Canticles is such an allegory. The subject is discussed in full in Terry's Biblical Hermeneutics, etc., chapter vii, 214-38.

In the history of Biblical exegesis allegory represents a distinct type of interpretation, dating back to pre-Christian times, practiced particularly by the Alexandrian Jews, and adopted by the early Church Fathers and still practiced and defended by the Roman Catholic church. This method insists that the literal sense, particularly of historical passages, does not exhaust the divinely purposed meaning of such passages, but that these latter also include a deeper and higher spiritual and mystical sense. The fourfold sense ascribed to the Scriptures finds its expression in the well-known saying: Littera gesta docet; quid credas, allegorica; moralis, quid agas, quid speres, anagogica ("The letter shows things done; what you are to believe, the allegoric; what you are to do, the moral; what you are to hope, the anagogic"), according to which the allegorical is the hidden dogmatical meaning to be found in every passage.

Cremer, in his Biblico-Theological New Testament Lexicon, shows that this method of finding a hidden thought behind the simple statement of a passage, although practiced so extensively on the Jewish side by Aristobulus and especially Philo, is not of Jewish origin, but was, particularly by the latter, taken from the Alexandrian Greeks (who before this had interpreted Greek mythology as the expression of higher religious conceptions) and applied to a deeper explanation of Old Testament historical data, together with its theophanies, anthropomorphisms, anthropopathies, and the like, which in their plain meaning were regarded as unworthy of a place in the Divine revelation of the Scriptures. Such allegorizing became the common custom of the early Christian church, although not practiced to the same extent in all sections, the Syrian church exhibiting the greatest degree of sobriety in this respect. In this only Jewish precedent was followed; the paraphrases commonly known as the Targum, the Midrash, and later in its most extreme form in the Kabbalah, all showed this mark of eisegesis instead of exegesis. This whole false hermeneutical principle and its application originated doubtless in an unhistorical conception of what the Scriptures are and how they originated. It is characteristic of the New Testament, and one of the evidences of its inspiration, that in the entire Biblical literature of that age, both Jewish and Christian, it is the only book that does not practice allegorizing but abides by the principle of the literal interpretation. Nor is Paul's exegesis in Ga 4:21-31 an application of false allegorical methods. Here in Ga 4:24 the term allegoroumena need not be taken in the technical sense as expressive of a method of interpretation, but merely as a paraphrase of the preceding thought; or, if taken technically, the whole can be regarded as an argumentum ad hominem, a way of demonstration found also elsewhere in Paul's writings.

The Protestant church, beginning with Luther, has at all times rejected this allegorizing and adhered to the safe and sane principle, practiced by Christ and the entire New Testament, namely, Sensum ne inferas, sed efferas ("Do not carry a meaning into (the Scriptures) but draw it out of (the Scriptures)"). It is true that the older Protestant theology still adheres to a sensus mysticus in the Scriptures, but by this it means those passages in which the sense is conveyed not per verba (through words), but per res verbis descriptas ("through things described by means of words"), as e.g. in the parable and the type.

In homiletics allegorizing is applied to the method which draws spiritual truths from common historical statements, as e.g. when the healing of a leper by Christ is made the basis of an exposition of the healing of the soul by the Saviour. Naturally this is not interpretation in the exegetical sense.

G. H. Schodde

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

n. Fable (in which what is stated as a fact is figuratively applied), parable, apologue, story, tale, myth. See parable.

Moby Thesaurus

Marchen, Western, Western story, Westerner, adventure story, allusion, analogy, apologue, arcane meaning, assumption, balancing, bedtime story, charactery, cipher, coloration, comparative anatomy, comparative degree, comparative grammar, comparative judgment, comparative linguistics, comparative literature, comparative method, compare, comparing, comparison, confrontation, confrontment, connotation, contrast, contrastiveness, conventional symbol, correlation, detective story, distinction, distinctiveness, emblem, fable, fabliau, fairy tale, fantasy, fiction, figuration, folk story, folktale, gest, ghost story, hint, horse opera, iconology, ideogram, implication, implied meaning, import, inference, innuendo, intimation, ironic suggestion, legend, likening, logogram, logotype, love knot, love story, matching, meaning, metaphor, metaphorical sense, mystery, mystery story, myth, mythology, mythos, nuance, nursery tale, occult meaning, opposing, opposition, overtone, parable, parallelism, pictogram, presumption, presupposition, proportion, relation, romance, science fiction, shocker, simile, similitude, space fiction, space opera, subsense, subsidiary sense, suggestion, supposition, suspense story, symbol, symbolic system, symbolism, symbolization, symbology, thriller, tinge, token, totem, totem pole, touch, trope of comparison, type, typification, undercurrent, undermeaning, undertone, weighing, whodunit, work of fiction