Personification (Figure of Speech) – Meaning, Examples & Usage

My phone died in the middle of the call. Phones don’t die. People and animals do. But everyone understands the sentence immediately, and it’s more vivid than “my battery ran out”. Giving a human quality to something that isn’t human is called personification.

Definition

Personification is a figure of speech in which an object, an animal, an idea or a force of nature is described as if it could act, feel or think like a person. It works a lot like a metaphor, because it describes one thing in terms of another, in this case a person.

The wind whispered through the trees. The stars winked at us. Opportunity knocked at my door.

The Quickest Way to Spot It: Look at the Verb

In most sentences with personification, the human quality sits in the verb. Ask: Could the subject really do this?

Sometimes the human quality is in an adjective instead: the angry sea, a lazy afternoon, the cruel winter. Seas and afternoons don’t have feelings, so these count too.

Everyday Personification

We use personification constantly without thinking of it as a figure of speech:

• Time flies.

• The car refused to start.

• My laptop hates me today.

• The city never sleeps.

• The camera loves her.

• Justice is blind.

Personification or Anthropomorphism?

These two are related, but they aren’t the same.

Personification is a figure of speech. It gives one human quality to a thing for a moment, to make a description more vivid. “The wind howled” doesn’t mean the wind is a character.

Anthropomorphism makes an animal or object a full character that walks, talks and thinks like a person throughout a story. The monkey and the crocodile in the Panchatantra, Mickey Mouse and the toys in Toy Story are all anthropomorphic.

A simple way to tell them apart: if the non-human thing has a name and a personality, it’s anthropomorphism. If it’s simply described in a human way for one line, it’s personification.

Personification in Poetry

Poets reach for personification because it lets readers feel a scene as well as see it.

William Wordsworth, describing daffodils in 1807:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Flowers don’t have heads or dance, but the picture is instantly clear: a field full of flowers moving cheerfully in the wind.

Emily Dickinson goes further and turns death into a polite visitor:

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –

Here, Death is a gentleman who stops his carriage for the speaker. A frightening idea becomes calm, almost courteous, and that’s what makes the poem so memorable. Reading poems like these aloud and talking about the pictures they create is part of the reading and creative writing sessions in Bambinos’ English course.

Turning Plain Sentences into Personification

A good writing exercise is to take a flat sentence and change only the verb.

Then ask kids to try three of their own: the fan, the school bell and their alarm clock. The point isn’t to cram personification into every sentence. One well-chosen verb in a paragraph is usually enough.

A teacher’s feedback helps here, because kids often can’t tell which of their verbs is the strongest. If you’d like that for your kid, you can book them a free class with a teacher.