Definition of "hyperbole"

Hyperbole soars too high, or creeps too low,Exceeds the truth, things wonderful to shew.]

Langley, A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster: Printed by C. White, Baxter-Gate, page 12

The great staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence.

1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Legends of the Province House

"Nay, nay, good Sumach," interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole, with patience […]

1841, J[ames] Fenimore Cooper, chapter VIII, in The Deerslayer: A Tale. […], 1st British edition, volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], page 248

Of course the hymn has come to us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own soil—which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.

c. 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, Productive Scholarship

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies..People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

1987, Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal, page 58

In these circumstances, hyperbole is called for, the rhetorical figure that raises its objects up, excessively, way above their actual merit : it is not to deceive by exaggeration that one overshoots the mark, but to allow the true value, the truth of what is insufficiently valued, to appear.

1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, in Cigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published 1993, page 17

The perennial problem, especially for the BBC, has been to reconcile the hyperbole-driven agenda of newspapers with the requirement of balance, which is crucial to the public service remit.

2001, Tom Bentley, Daniel Stedman Jones, The Moral Universe

[…] and when he ſpeakes, / 'Tis like a Chime a mending. With tearmes vnſquar' / Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropt, / Would ſeemes Hyperboles

c. 1602, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act I, scene iii], column 2

The honourable gentleman forces us to hear a good deal of this detestable rhetoric; and then he asks why, if the secretaries of the Nizam and the King of Oude use all these tropes and hyperboles, Lord Ellenborough should not indulge in the same sort of eloquence?

1843, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Gates of Somnauth