Word.ws English Dictionary

illiteracy

/ɪˈlɪtəɹəsi/

illiteracy noun: the inability to read and write.

Noun

illiteracy (countable and uncountable, plural illiteracies)

  1. (uncountable) The inability to read and write.
    • Illiteracy is widespread in certain areas of the country.
    • The heroines of these plays speak out against intraracial biases, stereotyping, lynchmobs, illiteracy, poverty, promiscuity, self-righteousness, verbally abusive men, rape, and miscegenation. […] Without warning the doctor, she chokes the life out of her child in order to keep him safe from white...1990, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, “Preface”, in Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, New York, N.Y.: Praeger Publishers, →ISBN, page xiv
  2. (uncountable) The portion of a population unable to read and write, generally given as a percentage.
  3. (countable) A word, phrase, or grammatical turn thought to be characteristic of an illiterate person.
  4. (broadly, uncountable) Unlearnedness; the state of being ignorant or unlettered.

illiteracy meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam

illiteracy in Hindi

inability to read and write
निरक्षरता nirakṣartā

illiteracy in Tamil

கல்லாமை, கல்வியில்லாத, எழுதப்படிக்கத் தெரியாத, படிப்பறிவின்மை

illiteracy in Telugu

inability to read and write
నిరక్షరాస్యత nirakṣarāsyata

illiteracy in Malayalam

illiterateness, inability to read or write
നിരക്ഷരത, നിരക്ഷരത്വം, അക്ഷരശൂന്യത, എഴുത്തറിയായ്മ, അക്ഷരാഭ്യാസമില്ലായ്മ, അക്ഷരജ്ഞാനമില്ലായ്മ
ignorance, unawareness, inexperience
അജ്ഞത, അജ്ഞത്വം, അജ്ഞാനം, അനഭിജ്ഞത, അശിക്ഷിതത്വം, ഉന്മോഹം
More languagesFewer languages
illiteracy in Kannada
ಅನಕ್ಷರತೆ, ವಿದ್ಯಾಹೀನತೆ, ಅಜ್ಞಾನ
illiteracy in Tagalog
dikanulatan, kamaangan
illiteracy in Arabic
أُمِّيَّة ʔummiyya
illiteracy in Indonesian
buta aksara

Examples of illiteracy in a sentence

  • John Allen Paulos and others have asked our society to consider numeracy and innumeracy in a way closer to how we view literacy and illiteracy.
  • The illiteracy of the southern Negroes now seemed due to Caucasian “tricknollogy”.
  • Fan Guiying, a working woman residing in Minquanfang neighborhood of Shahekou District, Dalian, got rid of illiteracy after one year of learning.

All 10 example sentences with illiteracy

Synonyms of illiteracy

Antonyms

Forms of illiteracy

pluralilliteracies

Origin of illiteracy

From il- + literacy.

Words formed from illiteracy

Questions about illiteracy

What does illiteracy mean?
Illiteracy means the inability to read and write.
What is illiteracy in Hindi?
Illiteracy in Hindi is निरक्षरता (nirakṣartā). See Illiteracy meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is illiteracy?
Illiteracy is a noun.
How do you pronounce illiteracy?
Illiteracy is pronounced /ɪˈlɪtəɹəsi/.
What is the plural of illiteracy?
The plural of illiteracy is illiteracies.

Words near illiteracy in the dictionary

  1. illision
  2. illisions
  3. illistrate
  4. illite
  5. illiteracies
  6. illiteracy
  7. illiteral
  8. illiterally
  9. illiterate
  10. illiterately
  11. illiterateness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: illiteracy (page history and authors); illiteracy (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); illiteracy (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); illiteracy (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-illiteracy.ogg.

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