Word.ws English Dictionary

found literature

found literature noun: literature created by taking words, phrases, or passages from other sources and combining or editing them so as to impart new meaning.

Noun

found literature (uncountable)

  1. Literature created by taking words, phrases, or passages from other sources and combining or editing them so as to impart new meaning.
    • Cohen embraced the clipping as a kind of found literature-an indigenous comic genre. "An Elder of Zion," a persona Cohen assumed in the journal in 1929, was also addicted to cutting tidbits out of the Jewish press,[…]1981, Jacob Rader Marcus, Abraham Joseph Peck, Studies in the American Jewish Experience: Contributions from the Fellowship Programs of the American Jewish Archives
    • French leadership in found literature has shifted to found music, musique concrete, in which natural sounds are introduced into musical compositions, often to the exclusion of traditional instrumentation.2005, John Robert Colombo, All the poems of John Robert Colombo

Questions about found literature

What does found literature mean?
Found literature means literature created by taking words, phrases, or passages from other sources and combining or editing them so as to impart new meaning.
What part of speech is found literature?
Found literature is a noun.

Words near found literature in the dictionary

  1. found forth
  2. found God
  3. found in
  4. found it in one's heart
  5. found it in oneself
  6. found literature
  7. found money
  8. found music
  9. found object
  10. found objects
  11. found on

Source and license

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