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LIKEN
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (verb)
Verb forms
Present simple: I / you / we / they liken ... he / she / it likens
Past simple: likened
Past participle: likened
-ing form: likening
Sense 1
Meaning:
Consider or describe as similar, equal, or analogous
Example:
You cannot equate success in financial matters with greed
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Verbs of thinking, judging, analyzing, doubting
Hypernyms (to "liken" is one way to...):
consider; study (give careful consideration to)
Sentence frames:
Somebody ----s somebody PP
Somebody ----s something PP
Context examples:
His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
He could not express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
I noted them walking the deck together one morning, and I likened them to the extreme ends of the human ladder of evolution—the one the culmination of all savagery, the other the finished product of the finest civilization.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren in the new land.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
