This article contributes a new analysis of verbal irony to the literature. It presents the main analyses of verbal irony – and the main criticisms of these analyses – found in both older and modern literatures as part of its attempt to build a new account for verbal irony. Thus, this paper discusses traditional, echoic and pretense accounts of irony and the limitations of these analyses. It argues for a new analysis, suggesting that there are multiple types of verbal irony that should be examined under more than one analytical approach based on their meanings. This paper suggests that ironic verbal expressions that communicate the opposite of their literal meaning should be analyzed as a type of metaphor with two oppositional subjects in which the ironist pretends to believe that they resemble one another