Abstract
What is the common point between Gulliver's conversation with the various people he encounters during his travels, Swift's irony, and the book itself being considered both as a fairy tale for children and a bitter satire of the government of England and of humankind as a whole at the same time? These significant features were all made possible thanks to the power of words in their miscellaneous forms. Words in themselves are ordinary things, but in Gulliver's Travels more than in any other work of fiction, they are provided with extraordinary power. Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher, used to say that "without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men". We may reuse his sentence and adapt it to our study, by stating that without knowing the power of words, it is impossible to know men. This statement will be beautifully illustrated by the words in Gulliver's travels.
