Word.ws English Dictionary

antiverbal

antiverbal adjective: opposing or avoiding the use of speech or words.

Adjective

antiverbal (comparative more antiverbal, superlative most antiverbal)

  1. Opposing or avoiding the use of speech or words.
    • Though in very different ways, Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, and Didion each define their subjects as somehow beyond words — antiverbal or nonverbal, threatening or sublime, overpowering and intense or private and intuitive […]1987, Wayne (Chris) Anderson, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction (page 5)
    • Othello, Horatio, and Brutus strike me as notable exemplars of laconicism, but in Hotspur's case Shakespeare creates an antiverbal bias that is not so much philosophical as it is bound up in gender stereotype.1989, Ronald L. Dotterer, Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context, page 206

Forms of antiverbal

comparativemore antiverbal
superlativemost antiverbal

Origin of antiverbal

From anti- + verbal.

Questions about antiverbal

What does antiverbal mean?
Antiverbal means opposing or avoiding the use of speech or words.
What part of speech is antiverbal?
Antiverbal is an adjective.

Words near antiverbal in the dictionary

  1. antivenom
  2. antivenomic
  3. antivenomics
  4. antivenomous
  5. antivenoms
  6. antiverbal
  7. antiverse
  8. antiverses
  9. antivertex
  10. antivertices
  11. antivertiginous

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: antiverbal (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: “antiverbal.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/antiverbal. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.