personification

/pɚˌsɑ.nə.fəˈkeɪ.ʃən/

personification means A person, thing, or name typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification. It carries an Arena rating of 1612, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.

Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, personification ranks #691 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #1,705 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #3,720 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say, #4,224 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words.

personification is pronounced /pɚˌsɑ.nə.fəˈkeɪ.ʃən/.

Why “personification” is a great word

Personification is the literary or artistic process of endowing an abstract concept or inanimate object with human characteristics, form, or consciousness. From personify (from Latin persona, "mask, character, person" + -ficāre, "to make") + the noun-forming suffix -ification, meaning "the process of making." First recorded in English use in the early 18th century. Unlike allegory, which constructs a sustained symbolic narrative, or anthropomorphism, which broadly ascribes human traits to gods or animals, personification is a precise, local act of imaginative grafting. It is the clock anxiously sweeping its hands forward, the wind sighing through a keyhole with tired resignation, or winter wrapped in a fur cloak of silence—a small, consoling lie that the world is populated with minds like our own, our ancient refusal to let anything remain merely itself.

Etymology

From person(ify) + -ification.

noun

A person, thing, or name typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification.e.g.“Adolf Hitler was the personification of anti-Semitism.”
An artistic representation of an abstract quality as a human.e.g.“The Grim Reaper is a personification of death.”
The process of creating such a representation: a literary device or other artistic method in which an inanimate object or an idea is given human qualities.e.g.“You might search in vain if you go looking for personification in his works: his style was very concrete.”

Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Words closest in meaning

By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.

personificator 74% match — One who personifies; a personifier. vs personification →
personifying 72% match — Personification. vs personification →
personify 67% match — To be an example of; to have all the attributes of. vs personification →
impersonization 66% match — A manifestation in corporeal form; personification. vs personification →
prosopopoeia 60% match — An act of personifying a person or object when communicating to an audience; a figure of speech involving this. vs personification →
embody 59% match — To represent in a physical or concrete form; to incarnate or personify. vs personification →
anthropomorphize 58% match — To endow with human qualities. vs personification →
exemplification 58% match — The act of exemplifying; a showing or illustrating by example. vs personification →