Words & WritingGreek → English
Hyperbole
/haɪˈpɜːbəli/noun
Deliberate exaggeration used for effect and not meant to be believed.
The Greek roots
ὑπέρ
hypér
over, beyond
βάλλειν
bállein
to throw
Literally: “a throwing beyond”
The story of the word
The image is athletic: a throw that overshoots the mark. Greek rhetoricians listed ὑπερβολή among the figures of speech, and mathematicians used the same noun for the conic section whose eccentricity exceeds one, so hyperbola and hyperbole are the same word split into two English spellings. Its opposite, litotes, understates on purpose.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
hyperbolaparableproblemsymbolmetabolism
In a sentence
Saying the queue took a lifetime is hyperbole, but it did take ninety minutes.