as in dead metaphor
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Recent Examples of code word
As Jamie divulges the details of the enterprise, including the special code words staff must use in the presence of The Butcher, Cooper gets increasingly nervous.
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Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 1 Aug. 2024
Kingsley suggests having a code word with your friends and family to verify their identity.
—Betty Lin-Fisher, USA TODAY, 4 June 2024
The posts are promptly posted and removed with code words and emojis used to market and sell illicit drugs.
—Nickolaus Hayes, New York Daily News, 16 June 2024
Whereas other sites and apps almost eliminated drug postings after scrutiny by law enforcement, dealers on Craigslist seemingly remained active using code words.
—Kevinisha Walker, Los Angeles Times, 8 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for code word 
Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 1 Aug. 2024
Kingsley suggests having a code word with your friends and family to verify their identity.
—Betty Lin-Fisher, USA TODAY, 4 June 2024
The posts are promptly posted and removed with code words and emojis used to market and sell illicit drugs.
—Nickolaus Hayes, New York Daily News, 16 June 2024
Whereas other sites and apps almost eliminated drug postings after scrutiny by law enforcement, dealers on Craigslist seemingly remained active using code words.
—Kevinisha Walker, Los Angeles Times, 8 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for code word
Recent Examples of Synonyms for code word
Noun
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Many of our emotion terms are references to states of the body—we’re downcast, bent out of shape, head over heels, shaken up, down in the mouth—which have slowly rigidified into dead metaphor.Nikhil Krishnan, The New Yorker, 1 Aug. 2022
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This shift reminds us that dead metaphors aren’t always terminally dead.Rob Nixon, Smithsonian, 23 Mar. 2018
Noun
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Additionally, the use of Cold War–era analogies—or even analogies from the war in Ukraine—might go out the window if the United States decided to deploy troops to defend Taiwan.Michael Poznansky, Foreign Affairs, 3 Jan. 2025
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Newton used the analogy of a cannonball, fired horizontally, following a similar curve back down to the ground.Keith Cooper, Space.com, 13 Jan. 2025
Noun
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The simile is novel and yet the sort of thing a young woman would think; there is assonance and consonance seesawing across the sentence, which is slow and gorgeous rather than quick and thrilling.Joanna Biggs, Harper's Magazine, 2 Feb. 2024
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These circumstances conducive to socialization are most obviously available for young people on athletic teams, but the sports simile is easily applicable to young people in marching band, theater productions, student council, volunteer and community settings and the robotics club.Jeff Nelligan, Baltimore Sun, 4 Dec. 2024
Noun
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Collision, as used by PST ART, is tech-bro speak, a euphemism, like the buzzword disruption, that promises the creation of new, exciting opportunities while minimizing the severity of moral quandaries and social ills.Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann, Artforum, 1 Jan. 2025
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For example, Walker explains to Juliette that people on the lower levels favor plain speaking over bureaucratic euphemisms.Noel Murray, Vulture, 15 Nov. 2024
Noun
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In many ways, the orchestra is the perfect metaphor for the relationship between the individual and society.The Learning Network, New York Times, 10 Jan. 2025
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What Is ‘Vengeance Most Fowl’ About? Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a parable for the overreach of technology into our lives, using Wallace’s clunky inventions as a metaphor for smartphones, tablets and generative AI.Dani Di Placido, Forbes, 9 Jan. 2025
Noun
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Here, instead, she’s swayed by a dead Diana softly squeezing her hand and kindly hinting — the dead Diana is an ace at tactful circumlocution — that now is the time to show a mourning nation some emotion.Tom Gliatto, Peoplemag, 16 Nov. 2023
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By condensing Balzac’s opus to a few paragraphs, Barthelme was having a laugh not just at his predecessor’s genteel circumlocution—his tendency to describe buildings and manufacturing procedures and family trees in lavish detail—but also at the conventions of novelistic mimesis itself.Giles Harvey, The New York Review of Books, 23 Apr. 2020
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Cite this Entry
“Code word.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/code%20word. Accessed 17 Jan. 2025.
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