Sound & Speech Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

A voice like Tina Turner gargling ball bearings.

Little Truman give a falsetto squawk of laughter so high it could only be detected by a bat.

She sang with a voice like chalk scratching a blackboard.

As silent as a burglar behind a curtain.

Francesca negotiated with a flourish, as though her words needed to be drawn in calligraphy.

Words skittered out of Reg's mouth like cartoon dogs on freshly-waxed linoleum, frantically going nowhere.

Post-op, when I grip a cup and saucer they take on the sound of castanets.

Casper has a minor hearing defect that results in his voice booming like a cathedral organ.

Cilla sings like a chainsaw hitting a bag of rusty nails.

The Cornish yokel spoke as though Brian Blessed had decided to show off by reading Chaucer while drunk.

The atonal jazz musician sounds as if he is playing to an audience of cobras.

The young girl jarringly uses the word 'like' as though it were a comma and full-stop, and she was dictating a telegram.

In our open-plan office, his Birmingham accent grated like dragging a huge wooden table, in a monastery, across a bare concrete floor.

That X-factor singer touched more bum notes than a counterfeiter.

His head whistles in a crosswind.

When Cilla sings deaf people wince; they refuse to watch her lips move.

A conversation with Edwina was somewhat one-sided, like receiving the dentist's drill without anaesthetic.

Despite being in her twenties, Lottie's voice was that of frail dowager protesting at natives mistreating a donkey.

The working-class clatter of dominoes on Formica.

Quotation is the hard currency of banter.

Kelvin speaks . . . frustratingly . . . slow, like this hard drive that can't keep up with my typing!

The DJ sounds as if he's talking with Harpic being pushed up the nostrils with an electric toothbrush.

The singing contestant's approach to the microphone was that of a man pleading to a hostile jury.

A voice of spitting sibilants like grilling sausages.

Her words reacted like an isotope of uranium inside his ear.

A conversation with him is like playing a jukebox of monologues, triggering cues that chime out set speeches.

After so many years of smoking, her highest note was one octave below laryngitis.

His voice was keyed in Mancunian E-flat with double innuendo.

I heard more audible and impromptu complaints to the Divinity than an FBI eavesdropper hears listening in on the Mafia.

Caspar called the waiter over like a mastodon bellowing across the primeval swamps.

The barrister enunciated with the toothed efficiency of a sharp mowing machine.

He mumbles so low that only moles and mushrooms can hear him, so low that molecules mysteriously fall apart.

Listening to Reg's speech was like hearing the complete National Rail Timetable through Stephen Hawking's voice box.

The X-factor audience were whooping as though she was liberating them from the Nazis.

Nightingales singing to the orchestral accompaniment of croaking frogs.

In my reverie the phone rang and hit me like the corrective shock of a pacemaker.

An iced drink in Doug's hand becomes a percussion instrument.

Rob roared with frustration at the computer screen; those at the other side of the office thought a Phantom jet had flown by with its afterburners on.

He sounded like a pre-fire caveman trying to ward off hypothermia.

Hesketh has a posher accent than the Queen reciting an elocution lesson.

Claude projected his creamy voice of Empire like a luvvie over-egging Shakespeare.

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs — The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells.

Wilfred Owen
Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917

The body language clashed, like watching a spaghetti Western where the lips don't sync with the words.

The old professor croaked like a speak-your-weight machine with a flat battery.

The pub carpet was soaked with a coat of glue substance that sounded like a door opening on the Starship Enterprise.

Her nagging was like hearing a tap drip unrepaired for twenty years. Even now she's left I still have tinnitus.

His speech rehashed the same point over and over, like chanting an inexhaustible thesaurus.

The conversation pointlessly re-ran in my mind like a toy train endlessly circling a nerd's attic.

Despite the noise of the party, the baby's cry pierced the air like a tungsten-tipped dart thrown hard by Jockie Wilson.

He has van Gogh's ear for music and sings like a rusty hinge.