Hyperbole

Hyperbole 

• I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse!
• You snore louder than a freight train.
• He sleeps like a log.
• "I have seen this river so wide it had only one bank." - Mark Twain
• She is older than the hills.
• That joke is so old, the last time I heard it I was riding on a dinosaur.
• If he talks to me, I will die of embarrassment.
• My backpack weighs a ton!
• I'm so busy trying to accomplish ten million things at once.
• His smile was a mile wide.
• Her eyes were as wide as saucers.
• It's raining cats and dogs.
• He was as big as an elephant!

Here are some common examples of hyperboles:

·         I have a million things to do.

·         I had to walk 15 miles to school in the snow, uphill.

·         I had a ton of homework.

·         If I can’t buy that new game, I will die.

·         He is as skinny as a toothpick.

·         This car goes faster than the speed of light.

·         That new car costs a bazillion dollars.

·         We are so poor; we don’t have two cents to rub together.

·         That joke is so old, the last time I heard it I was riding on a dinosaur.

·         They ran like greased lightning.

·         He's got tons of money.

·         You could have knocked me over with a feather.

·         Her brain is the size of a pea.

·         He is older than the hills.

Following are some short hyperboles from literature:

·         The skin on her face was as thin and drawn as tight as the skin of onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two picks.

·         It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable. The pain unendurable.

·         People moved slowly then. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.

·         It's a slow burg. I spent a couple of weeks there one day.

·         Why does a boy who’s fast as a jet take all day and sometimes two to get to school?