as in dead metaphor
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Recent Examples of code word
After the Vietnam War, military officials started using a computer system to reconcile nicknames and code words, called the Code Word, Nickname, and Exercise Term System, or NICKA.
—
Chandelis Duster, NPR, 16 Nov. 2025
Was there literally a code word?
—Benjamin Siegel, ABC News, 21 Oct. 2025
Greater Manchester Police had declared PLATO – a national code word used when police deploy armed officers across the force to the scene of an attack, CNN understands.
—Peter Wilkinson, CNN Money, 2 Oct. 2025
So, the vertices that are indexing positions of my code word.
—Quanta Magazine, 7 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for code word
Chandelis Duster, NPR, 16 Nov. 2025
Was there literally a code word?
—Benjamin Siegel, ABC News, 21 Oct. 2025
Greater Manchester Police had declared PLATO – a national code word used when police deploy armed officers across the force to the scene of an attack, CNN understands.
—Peter Wilkinson, CNN Money, 2 Oct. 2025
So, the vertices that are indexing positions of my code word.
—Quanta Magazine, 7 Aug. 2025
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
-
Baseball has a lot of good analogies for fatherhood, even if most of them break down rather quickly.—
Caleb Harris,
Austin American Statesman,
4 Feb. 2026
-
That’s the American analogy, where the traditional governing elite of one of the great parties of much of the country committed itself to something not just in the defense of slavery, but to slavery-plus, fortified and amplified by treason.—
David Frum,
The Atlantic,
28 Jan. 2026
Noun
-
Consider, for instance, the use of rhetorical figures such as metaphor or simile.—
Nino Letteriello,
Forbes.com,
22 Aug. 2025
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Want to read whole stanzas, even poems, constructed simile by simile?—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
2 June 2025
Noun
-
Everything else is a euphemism for old fashioned domination that the region has spent generations trying to escape.—
Boris Muñoz,
Time,
12 Jan. 2026
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In a year of cancellations and euphemisms, the city mounted a counterprogram that was quietly insurrectionary, stubbornly joyous.—
The Editors,
Curbed,
15 Dec. 2025
Noun
-
Postnature, then, demands a subjectivity that is plural and decenters the human; a postnatural ethics seeks to blur the boundaries between human and nature, crafting new metaphors for the permeability and porousness of life-forms.—
Catherine Taft,
Artforum,
1 Feb. 2026
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Though the rope suggests tidy metaphors of unity, coherence, and formal integrity, a playful but insistent messiness effloresces in Simms’s entanglements, throwing any seeming wholeness into question.—
Richard Brody,
New Yorker,
30 Jan. 2026
Noun
-
But in terms of its actual content, the statement was pretty thin gruel, bristling with public relations-style circumlocution and vagueness.—
Business Columnist,
Los Angeles Times,
27 Jan. 2026
-
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
Cite this Entry
“Code word.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/code%20word. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.
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