The article aims at investigating metaphorical target domains by means of corpus linguistics. The suggested research method is metaphorical pattern analysis, which claims that all the metaphors can be mapped out for a target domain by choosing one word to represent the domain and by analysing its occurrences in the corpus. The author makes the assumption that near-synonyms occur with the same metaphorical mappings. The presented analysis attempts to answer the research questions by examining an earlier metaphorical pattern analysis of near-synonyms and by analysing how the metaphors related to ‘anger’, ‘rage’, ‘fury’, and ‘wrath’ occur in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The consistent analysis and discussion of data confirm the initial hypothesis and lead to the conclusion that near-synonyms usually occur with the same metaphorical mappings, even though this does not mean that that entire target domains may be mapped out with a single search word.