apples and oranges
Fundamentally different things
Apples and oranges describes a comparison between things too different to be meaningfully compared: Comparing a novel to a film adaptation is apples and oranges.
The phrase usually appears with verbs like compare or mix.
The point isn't that either thing is better—just that the comparison itself is flawed.
- night and dayTotal contrast or constantly
- black and whiteWithout middle ground
- oil and waterProverbial unmixable substances
- day and nightBoth light and darkness
- differenceWay things contrast
chalk and cheese · incompatible · contrast · not the same · mismatched · odd couple · dissimilar · comparison · square peg in a round hole · like-for-like · incommensurable · polar opposites · false equivalence · poles apart · different strokes · dichotomy · worlds apart · antithesis
- food idiomspiece of cake, bread winner, low-hanging fruit, cool as a cucumber, bad egg
- incompatibilityoil and water, chalk and cheese, mismatch, clash, mismatched
- counting rhymeseeny meeny, sky blue, red white blue
- oppositesopposite, opposites, antonym, antonyms, inverse
- logical fallaciesfallacy, straw man, ad hominem, red herring, false dilemma
apples and orangespeas in a pod
Extremely similar things
two of a kind · birds of a feather · same difference · cut from the same cloth · one and the same
apples and orangesidentical
Exactly the same
interchangeable · equivalent · indistinguishable · synonymous · comparable