Figurative Language vs Literary Devices: A Quick Guide
People mix these up constantly. I've seen editors and teachers conflate them for years, and honestly it usually doesn't cause actual problems unless you're grading papers or writing a style guide. But if you want to be precise about it, here's how it breaks down. Figurative language is specifically language that departs from literal meaning. Simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, idiom, synecdoche, metonymy. That's it. It's about words doing something other than saying exactly what they mean.
Figurative Language Vs Literary Devices
Literary devices is the umbrella term. Everything in figurative language is a literary device, but not every literary device is figurative language. You've got symbolism, foreshadowing, irony, stream of consciousness narration, unreliable narrator, juxtaposition, allegory, allusion, motif. Some of those overlap with figurative language. Most of them don't. Here's where it gets messy in practice. Take irony. Situational irony isn't figurative language. It's a structural device. The humor or impact comes from the gap between expectation and outcome, not from a word being used non-literally. But verbal irony — that's basically sarcasm, and that's figurative because you're saying one thing and meaning another at the word level. I ran into this exact problem when editing a creative writing anthology last year. The submission guidelines asked authors to "highlight their use of figurative language," and three-quarters of the writers identified foreshadowing, symbolism, and motif as examples. Not wrong that they were using literary devices. Just wrong about the categorization.
The fix was straightforward. I told the authors to list their devices by actual type and note which ones were figurative. It took about ten minutes to sort through a 40-page manuscript. The submissions were fine — the writers just hadn't been taught the distinction clearly. Another edge case that trips people up: metonymy. It sits right on the border. "The White House issued a statement" — that's metonymy because a building is standing in for the people inside it. It's figurative. But some frameworks classify it as rhetorical rather than figurative. If you're working in an academic context, check which textbook or style guide your institution follows. They disagree on this more than you'd expect.
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Common Pitfalls
The biggest mistake beginners make is calling everything figurative. Symbolism isn't automatically figurative language. A red door in a novel might symbolize danger, but the door is literally red. The symbolic meaning is an interpretive layer, not a figurative substitution of words. Hyperbole is figurative because you're literally exaggerating at the linguistic level. The second mistake is thinking literary devices only appear in "literature." They show up in advertising copy, political speeches, song lyrics, and casual conversation all the time. Irony is everywhere. Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony and it's fundamentally figurative. When someone says "Oh great, another meeting" with obvious exhaustion, that's figurative language functioning as a literary device in everyday speech. If you need to analyze a text for a class or a review, start by identifying every device you can find, then separate them into figurative and non-figurative buckets. It's faster than trying to remember the taxonomy on the first pass. The whole process usually takes me under twenty minutes for a short story. A novel or a collection would take longer, obviously, but you're not going to find all the devices on a single read-through anyway.
The distinction matters most when you're being specific — teaching, editing, or doing close reading. In casual conversation, calling foreshadowing "figurative language" won't derail anything. But precision helps, especially when you're looking at how texts actually work rather than just labeling them.
