Embodiments relate to a system, program product, and method for use with an intelligent computer platform to decipher analogical phrases. The method identifies A category is identified and a list of definitions is created for each parsed subcomponent of the phrase. The definitions are ranked in the list based on their relevance to the identified category and an outcome is identified based on the ranked relevance. A corpus is searched for evidence of an analogical pattern associated with the ranked list and each entry in the ranked list is scored based on congruence with the analogical pattern. An outcome is generated based on the scoring and is representative of the definition with the strongest congruence to the analogical pattern.