Metafoorilist

Metafoorilist is a niche term used to describe a person who specializes in compiling, organizing, and analyzing lists of metaphors. A metafoorilist collects metaphorical expressions from literary texts, speeches, media, and everyday language, and arranges them in catalogs or databases. The practice often emphasizes categorization by topic, linguistic vehicle (the image used to convey the metaphor), tenor (the topic described), cultural domain, and degree of conventionality. This work supports stylistic analysis, language teaching, and corpus-driven studies of figurative language.

Origins and usage: The term is a neologism that appears mainly in informal linguistic discussions, writing workshops, or online communities. It is not a standard job title or discipline in formal academic programs, but the concept overlaps with undertakings in metaphor studies, lexicography of figurative language, and cognitive linguistics.

Applications: This kind of work can yield resources for literature teachers to illustrate metaphor use, for writers seeking varied figurative tools, and for researchers building datasets for metaphor detection, translation, or sentiment analysis. By comparing conventional and novel metaphors, metafoorists can illuminate cultural biases and communicative efficiency.

See also: metaphor, conceptual metaphor, figurative language, metaphor analysis, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics.