Short answer: a conceptual metaphor is not a phrase, it is a pattern of thought that produces many phrases. English speakers talk about arguments using the vocabulary of war ("he attacked my position," "I won that argument," "your claims are indefensible") because, in the account George Lakoff and Mark Johnson gave in Metaphors We Live By, we partly think about arguing in terms of fighting. The individual expressions are the visible surface. The conceptual metaphor, written in the convention ARGUMENT IS WAR, is the underlying map that generates them.
The idea in plain terms
Ordinary metaphor is a sentence-level event: one writer, one image, one line. A conceptual metaphor is bigger and much duller to look at, because it is shared, unconscious and spread across hundreds of everyday expressions that nobody experiences as figurative at all.
Wikipedia's article on conceptual metaphor defines it as "the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another," and sets out the two halves of every example. The source domain is the concrete area the language is borrowed from, such as war, money or physical height. The target domain is the abstract area being described, such as argument, time or mood. A conceptual metaphor is the systematic mapping from the first onto the second.
The giveaway is systematicity. One borrowed word is a figure of speech. Dozens of borrowed words, all from the same source, all pointing the same way, and all usable without anyone noticing them, indicate a conceptual metaphor underneath.
Where the idea comes from
The framework is set out in Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980 according to Wikipedia's article on the book. The publisher's current edition carries a new afterword by the authors reviewing how the theory developed inside cognitive science.
The claim that made the book influential is a claim about thought rather than style. On this account, metaphor lets people use what they already know from direct physical and social experience to handle abstractions they cannot touch: work, time, mental activity, feelings. If that is right, then metaphor is not an ornament added to plain thinking, it is part of the equipment that makes abstract thinking possible. Not everyone in linguistics accepts the strongest version of the claim, and later researchers have spent decades testing which parts hold up, but the descriptive apparatus is now standard vocabulary in the field.
Example 1: ARGUMENT IS WAR
This is the book's own opening example and still the clearest. Wikipedia's article on conceptual metaphor quotes these expressions from Lakoff and Johnson's discussion:
- "He won that argument"
- "I attacked every weak point in his argument"
- "I shot him down"
- "He blew my argument to pieces"
Everyday English supplies many more of the same shape: defending a position, holding ground, a line of attack, demolishing a case, a fight you cannot win, surrendering a point, calling a truce. None of them is poetic. All of them come from one source domain.
What makes the example important is the second half of the argument. If arguing is mapped onto fighting, then the structure of fighting comes along with the words: there are sides, the other person is an opponent, gains for one are losses for the other, and the event has a winner. Lakoff and Johnson ask readers to imagine a culture where argument is understood as a dance instead, with participants cooperating to reach an outcome together. The sentences would be different, and so would the behavior. Even our idiom for ending a dispute is borrowed from war: our page on the origin of bury the hatchet traces the phrase to a documented practice of putting weapons away.
Example 2 and 3: TIME IS MONEY and the orientational set
Wikipedia's article groups conceptual metaphors into three types, following the book's own division.
| Type | What it does | Named example | Everyday English |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structural | Maps the structure of one concept onto another | TIME IS MONEY | "I spent an hour on it," "that cost me a week," "a budget of two days" |
| Orientational | Organizes concepts along spatial axes | HAPPY IS UP | "my spirits rose," "I'm feeling low," "prices are rising" |
| Ontological | Treats an abstraction as a thing or a substance | LOVE IS A JOURNEY | "we've come a long way," "the relationship is going nowhere" |
TIME IS MONEY is the one to test yourself on, because English treats time as a finite, spendable resource so thoroughly that the alternatives sound odd. You spend it, save it, waste it, run out of it, invest it, budget it, and you can be asked whether something is worth your time. That whole vocabulary belongs to money and is applied, without comment, to hours.
The orientational set is stranger still, because it has no words of its own. Up means more, better, healthier, happier and more powerful; down means the opposite. Nothing about mood is literally above anything, yet "I'm feeling down" needs no explanation to any English speaker.
How to identify a conceptual metaphor yourself
A four-step method, usable on any paragraph.
- Find the abstract noun. Argument, time, love, inflation, a career, a company.
- List the verbs and adjectives attached to it in real speech. Not the ones a dictionary gives: the ones people actually use.
- Ask where those words literally belong. If they come from fighting, from money, from travel or from up and down, you have a candidate source domain.
- Write it as TARGET IS SOURCE and test it. Generate three new sentences from the mapping. If they sound like ordinary English rather than invented poetry, the mapping is real.
Applied to "a company," step two produces growth, health, leanness, headcount, arms, heads, bodies, and a company that is sick, bloated or dying. The source domain is a living organism, and the sentences generate easily, which is the test passing.
Why this matters for a writer, not just a linguist
Three practical consequences follow, and they are the reason the theory is worth a page on a site about figurative language.
Mixed metaphors are usually crossed source domains. "Let's not fight this battle on a sinking ship" fails because war and seafaring are two maps at once. Knowing the source domain tells you which words are available to you for the rest of the paragraph.
Framing choices are source-domain choices. Describing a negotiation as a war, a game, a dance or a construction project produces different sentences and invites different behavior from the reader. That choice is made at the level of the conceptual metaphor, before any individual sentence is written.
Many idioms are the fossilized output of a mapping. When a phrase makes no literal sense but everyone understands it, there is often a conceptual metaphor sitting underneath that is still live in the language. Not every fixed phrase works that way, though, which is why the origin has to be checked rather than assumed. "Kick the bucket" is a death euphemism whose literal picture is disputed, and our page on the kick the bucket origin sets out the beam-not-pail explanation the references actually support. Compare the break the ice origin, where the literal operation is documented and the figurative sense grew out of it directly. For how a reference establishes either kind of case, see our explainer on where idioms come from.
Limits worth stating
Conceptual metaphor theory is a description of patterns in language, and the mappings are not laws. Three cautions:
- A mapping is partial. ARGUMENT IS WAR carries over structure such as attack and defense, and leaves out violence, injury and death. Every mapping hides as much as it shows.
- Mappings vary between languages and periods. The examples on this page are English ones, and a mapping that is obvious in English may be absent elsewhere.
- The strong claim is contested. That people speak this way is observable. How much the speech reflects or shapes the underlying thought is an open research question, and the literature cited in the Wikipedia article includes experimental work testing exactly that.
Frequently asked questions
What is a conceptual metaphor in simple terms?
It is a habit of thinking about one abstract thing using the language of a concrete thing, which then shows up across many ordinary expressions. ARGUMENT IS WAR is the standard example: we talk about attacking, defending and winning arguments.
Who came up with conceptual metaphor theory?
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980. The book's updated edition adds an afterword by both authors.
Why are conceptual metaphors written in capital letters?
The capitals are a convention that marks the mapping itself rather than any sentence. TIME IS MONEY is the pattern; "you're wasting my time" is one expression produced by it.
What is the difference between a conceptual metaphor and an ordinary metaphor?
An ordinary metaphor is a single comparison made in a single sentence, usually noticed as figurative. A conceptual metaphor is a system that produces many expressions, most of which nobody notices as figurative at all.
Is ARGUMENT IS WAR a bad thing?
The theory describes it rather than judging it. The practical observation is that the mapping suggests winners and losers, and that other framings exist. Lakoff and Johnson's own thought experiment imagines a culture that treats argument as a dance.