Abstract: The use of metaphor is pervasive in all forms of discourse, and this trend will be extended in the future. Metaphor has been regarded as an important topic in ergonomics. This paper is concerned with providing a brief review of development of metaphor’s concepts, theories, and practice in some areas. As discribed in this article, mataphor has been regarded as not just a mode of figurative speech as the classical view, but a mode of cognitive processes which consist of many aspects of information processing. The devlopment of metaphor from traditional figuration theory to moden cognition theory indicates the immeasurable significance in the evolvement process of human language and congnition. Therefore, the application of mataphor in many field is rapidly expanding, that include internet technology, en-gineering, human-computer interface, organizational behavior and business enterprise management. Even now, the studies of mataphor still have been limited to methods of experiment and operative criterion in use. Consequently, a thoroughly discussion will be significative to the development of mataphor. We present this article and attempt to provide an integrated image of the metaphor with the purpose of further studies and practice for native researchers.

Key words: metaphor, theory of metaphor, usability, virtual reality