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In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. For many metaphors, the mapping between conceptual domains correspond to neural mappings in the brain, which entails that the human conceptual structure is tightly bound to its perceptual system.

This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was
explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By. Other cognitive scientists study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels "analogy" and "conceptual blending."

There are two main roles for the conceptual domains posited in conceptual metaphors:

  • Source domain: the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions.
  • Target domain: the conceptual domain that we try to understand.