Word.ws English Dictionary

illiteral

illiteral adjective: not literal.

Adjective

illiteral (comparative more illiteral, superlative most illiteral)

  1. Not literal.
    • Descending under the earth, is a translation most of all unexact and illiteral.1765, Benjamin Dawson, An Illustration of several Texts of Scripture, particularly those in which the Logos occurs
    • […] did from erroneous conceptions speak false, slanderous and illiteral things of JACOB TORIAN tending to implicate him in some degree with certain horse-thieves by representing him as being favourably disposed towards them […]1990, Genealogical Committee of the Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky Ancestors, volume 25, part 3

Forms of illiteral

comparativemore illiteral
superlativemost illiteral

Origin of illiteral

From il- + literal.

Words formed from illiteral

Questions about illiteral

What does illiteral mean?
Illiteral means not literal.
What part of speech is illiteral?
Illiteral is an adjective.

Words near illiteral in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: illiteral (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.

Last updated:

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