Word.ws English Dictionary

anteverbal

anteverbal adjective: prior to being verbal (using words).

Adjective

anteverbal (not comparable)

  1. (rare) Prior to being verbal (using words).
    • But his poetic mysticism is irreligious; God has become a "drug," a means of provoking the mystical nirvana. The dream state, the mere emptying out of content, is followed by a second, more active one. Out of the "lethal" experience is projected the intoxication immediately preceding the finding of...1954, Folio
    • ... beast-shaped, sphinx-pouched features of the primal face. I recalled the dicta of certain profoundly experienced men, that evil would come of their telling all they knew. I thought of the strange adages, that one should give up searching for the ultimate words that need only be spoken to...1960, Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision: Selected Writings, New Directions Publishing, →ISBN, page 37
  2. (rare) Preceding a verb.
    • Among the eleven such relationships within binary tactical phrases are anteverbal (nominal or pronominal material preceding verbal material, and postverbal (nominal or pronominal material following verbal material), and when relationships like the anteverbal and postverbal ...1963, Report of the Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies
    • For quotations using this term, see Citations:anteverbal.

Examples of anteverbal in a sentence

  • While the Ego is suspended in the tranquillity of the dream, an "original vision" (Urgesicht) emerges from it: "In the original vision life is superseded (anteverbal source of instinct), life ..."1954, Folio:
  • I sniffed in masks, I rattled in runes, I dove into demons with sleep-craving brutality, with mythical instincts, in the anteverbal, instinctual threat of prehistoric neura; I began to ...1960, Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision: Selected Writings, New Directions Publishing, →ISBN, page 37:

Origin of anteverbal

From ante- + verbal.

Questions about anteverbal

What does anteverbal mean?
Anteverbal means prior to being verbal (using words).
How do you use anteverbal in a sentence?
While the Ego is suspended in the tranquillity of the dream, an "original vision" (Urgesicht) emerges from it: "In the original vision life is superseded (anteverbal source of instinct), life ..."
What part of speech is anteverbal?
Anteverbal is an adjective.

Words near anteverbal in the dictionary

  1. antetypes
  2. antevaginal
  3. antevasin
  4. antevasins
  5. antevenient
  6. anteverbal
  7. anteversion
  8. anteversions
  9. antevert
  10. anteverted
  11. anteverting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: anteverbal (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “anteverbal.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/anteverbal. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.