The idea of figurative discourse plays a salient role in Ockham’s nominalism. He frequently reinterprets certain authoritative statements as mere figurative ways of speaking and this allows him to neutralize the apparent ontological commitments of these authoritative statements when they conflict with the parsimonious ontology that he favors. Section 13.1 of this chapter shows how the method works in practice by providing examples of such figurative interpretations. Sections 13.2 and 13.3 review the theoretical elements that are proposed in the Summa Logicae with respect to figurative speech. It discusses in particular Ockham’s approach to metaphor and his unexpected insistence on hypallage. Section 13.4, finally, examines Ockham’s distinction between the sense a sentence has in virtue of the language and the sense in which it is intended by the speaker. Ockham’s implicit conditions for figurative meaning as opposed to literal meaning are thus brought out.